Making a Melody
Over the years of my life, I’ve been aware of something that I always took for granted: I can write a melody almost as easily as I can write a sentence. That probably sounds rather arrogant to you, but, to me, it’s simply a fact that I never pondered until recently. I remember, when I first listened to George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” as a teenager, something deep within me knew, without one doubt, that I was not destined to be a genius like George Gershwin. Perhaps that something deep inside is an innate wisdom that whispers, “Oh well,” at least, in some of us. While “Oi vey” is the essence of Jewish wisdom, I suspect “Oh well, is the essence of Buddhism.
As I have grown older, I have been quite stunned to discover that many people are simply incapable of accepting reality, or as Krishnamurti says, accepting “what is.” I have heard a few clients say, “I hate reality,” and I wonder, where one can go or grow from from hating reality? Perhaps this is why, in accepting the reality that I was not destined to write the next great American opera, it was not a resignation or giving up at all, and perhaps that is partly why the fact that my mind seemed to think in melody was never a big deal to me. Also, making a melody seemed to go with the mountain culture in which I was born. Entire families used to sing and play the guitar together. It’s in our blood. I believe that Dolly Parton said that she once jotted a song down on a table napkin. So have I.
What is a melody? It is a combination of musical notes, strung together in a rhythmic pattern to create something the mind recognizes as familiar. It can be pleasing, soothing or vaguely disturbing, but something deep within recognizes it, like meeting an old friend. A melody is somewhat analogous to a sentence. It has a beginning, middle and an end, and like a sentence, it is complete in itself. It does not depend on anything other than its own unique combination of notes. I can hum Gershwin’s “Summertime” without his lush orchestration or DuBose Heyward’s haunting lyrics, and the melody will still resonate in my mind.
But a melody cannot be too long! Like an interesting sentence, a melody can have more than one phrase, but the mind will soon lose interest if it does not come to rest within a certain timeframe. In other words, a melody cannot go on forever. I am fascinated by how some people can drone on and on, getting lost in this detail or that, seemingly without the slightest awareness that they are boring the listener to an early death! I wonder if their words are disconnected from the melody in their mind. Probably.
Also, I suspect, if you cannot repeat a melody when you first hear it, it may be too complex and not such a good melody at that. Although a melody stands alone, it is how it fits in the context, how it “intermingles” with the harmonic structure that makes a melody truly memorable. For instance, if you change the harmony - the chord underneath a melody - from a major to a minor chord, that same melody will immediately feel more somber or sad. Aren’t we exactly like this? Some unnameable thing changes with each interaction we have with another person. If he or she smiles at you, your inner melody changes.
Simple chords tend to make a melody seem more simple, such as “Amazing Grace.” But as Jung once said, the most simple things are always the most difficult, and how many “Amazing Graces” have been written in the past 400 years! Complex chords such as Gershwin’s, envelop the melody and haunt us with feeling, but then add a lyric which perfectly matches the rise and fall of the melody, and the magic truly begins.
“Summertime and the livin’ is easy.
Fish are jumping’ and the cotton is high.
Oh, your daddy’s rich and your mama’s good lookin’.
So hush little baby, don’t you cry. ”
Once, in New York, I gave a workshop for singers, attempting to help them experience how our body seems to resonate with changes in the texture of a melody. I chose “Here’s That Rainy Day,” by Jimmy Van Heusen for us to study, because, to me, it’s just about the most perfect ballad ever written. Not surprisingly, it has been covered by thousands of singers from Frank Sinatra to Bette Midler.
This is going to be too technical, I fear, but hang in there. You may want to listen to the song at the end of this wordy explanation, sung by a somewhat lesser known singer. The melody of “Here’s That Rainy Day” begins with two notes, plus the lyric, “maybe,” over a major chord. Van Heusen repeats the same note a third time to the lyric “I”. “Maybe, I.” Then he does a remarkable thing; as the melody repeats the same note a fourth time, Van Heusen changes the chord and the body literally feels a subtle change as the melody and lyric rises: “I should have saved those left-over dreams.” This change in feeling is beyond verbal description, which is why, in that class for singers, we closed our eyes as we listened to the melody and tried to feel how it changed when the chord changed. I asked them to try to sense how that change was felt in their body.
There is no doubt that the ability to sensually feel those textural changes is part of what makes a singer great, including opera, pop, blues, jazz or country singers. When they feel the music, so do we.
Recently, I found an old cassette labeled “Brooklyn tape” of music I played and sang in a studio, circa 1979. I was amazed to hear how high my voice was back then and such energy! I hated hearing that high voice in those early years in New York. It sounded a bit too . . uh . . . gay! For someone fresh from a tiny mountain town in Tennessee, where such a perverted person would inevitably feel scorned and laughed at, this was not exactly an “Oh well” for me.
Most of the songs on that Brooklyn tape are my own music and lyrics, and I hope to share some of my songs with you in future essays. But included in that tape was Jimmy Van Heusen’s “Here’s that Rainy Day,” which I recorded, probably near the time when I taught the workshop.
A brief postscript
After forty years of meditation, and as my mind became increasingly less disturbed by cascading thoughts - that constant trivia and mental chatter so ubiquitous in us, and as my mind became more still, I began to hear two notes humming. I probably had noticed this as a distraction decades earlier, but after months of sitting at the Forest Refuge, I started noticing those two notes humming over and over! Needless to say, I found it quite annoying. With each step I would take during walking meditation one note repeated itself on one step and the second one repeated itself on the following step. If I picked up the pace the notes hummed along at a faster pace. Later, I discovered that if I really concentrated on the in and out breath, and as the mind went into a deeper level stillness, my two notes would vanish, but only temporarily. The moment my mind became slightly active, my two notes returned.
In musical terminology, the two notes my mind hums are called a "perfect fourth" - for instance D to G or G to D are perfect fourths, so the boring “tune” is either “GG - DD or DD - - GG.” Obviously, this is not what one would call a melody. It’s a melodic phrase and thus not complete. So I decided to see if I could write a tune using only the two notes my mind constantly hums, and I was surprised to find that, while it was quite difficult, I was able to write a two note melody by adding interesting chords underneath. But, of course, my melody was truly boring and it felt incomplete, as if it needed one more note in order to flow in any direction. This is fascinating, to me, but for now let us skip over Jung’s fascination with “threes” and “fours.”
I saw that adding that third note totally opened up amazing possibilities for any melody I wanted to compose. It was as if, without that third note, the melody lacked a necessary ingredient. Lemonade takes water and lemon, but without the sugar it is not lemonade.
If we could strip away the thinking chatter that endlessly runs through the mind, I suspect we would discover that all human brains hum some combination of notes. Perhaps a person from India would hum a different interval of notes from, say, a person from China. My perfect fourths, “GG DD, DD GG’ create the first phrase of “Here Comes the Bride,” and the same two notes create the horrid sound of those German police sirens coming ever closer to Ann Frank.
Are we actually making music all the days of our lives? I wonder. It sounds rather hokey I suppose, the idea that our brains actually hum notes all the time. Perhaps it is only a musician who hears the brain hum notes, but I do not think so. When my friend Jane took a year off to meditate at the Forest Refuge, she heard amazing orchestral and choral pieces in her mind, music that she had never heard in her life, and yet Jane could not notate any of what she heard on paper.
My suspicion is that the complex and gorgeous music that Jane heard was the result of the brain beginning to be free of the tyranny of constant thought-words.
Musicians make music all the time, philosophers philosophize all the time, psychologists psychologize all the time, but it occurs to me that underneath all philosophizing, psychologizing or thinking, lies a melody that most of us cannot hear because we are so conditioned to listen to the word-thoughts. Perhaps our nervous system literally sings. I think that it does. It is said that each of the chakras in our body emits a different musical tone, a phenomena that I experienced at the Forest Refuge.
Sustain the sacred sound of Aum and you will produce a musical tone, in fact sustain any sound and you will discover that it must become a musical note. Try it! So I wonder, what it is that I am actually hearing when my brain hums its perfect fourths? Could it be something universal? Are my two notes part of some vast harmonic chord of major and minor thirds that hum in the universe? What if I were able to embrace those two boring notes that play over and over as the unique structure of my own melody? Rather than cursing the limitation of a brain that only plays an interval of two notes (surely Gershwin heard more than my puny two notes!), what if I could realize the infinite possibility of a life lived as a melody that plays through the good times and the bad times, changing in texture as life goes through its inevitable transitions? Changing in texture even as we go through a frightening pandemic? What if I could rest in my own unique sound and find comfort there even in the worst of times? What if each of us could find that third note and make a melody of our lives?
