Rhythm and Timbre

with PETER DALE

<< Melody and Memory

When Manuel de Falla introduced his Harpsichord Concerto to the world of 1926 it was as if a new instrument was being launched. Almost nobody knew what this instrument, familiar by name only, sounded like. But it wasn't altogether so much a matter of recovering an old sound. It wouldn't have been lost on the ears of those Jazz Age listeners that here was a timbre with a jazz edge to it - almost like a banjo. Something similar must have been thought when the cimbalon was first heard in the concert hall at the other end of Europe (Kodaly's Hary Janos - also of 1926). The muezzin-like nasal wailing of a muted trumpet, the extraordinary ability of the saxophone to snort, sigh and inflect its accents, seemed to be thrusting ahead into a new age, but, paradoxically for the most part, by a process of recovering the long-obscured bare essentials of music - in this case, the human voice, and also, by implication, pulse, the beat of the heart, the elemental phrasing imposed not by composers but by the voice itself and by its having to breathe. The artifice of endless string sound (never needing to breathe) we can see, as we look back now, is one of the most significant achievements of the music of the past but an achievement upon which, nevertheless, the 20th century has often tended to turn its back.

When Sibelius opened his first symphony (1899) with a long, long beautiful clarinet solo over a timpani pedal he was writing as one of the last of the Romantics and one of the first of the moderns. The phrases of the clarinet are almost impossibly long from the point of view of breathing. Try singing or humming them and you'll see what I mean. Well played, they sound wonderful, but they stretch music's roots in the natural span of human breathing almost to breaking point. In that sense this is music which, however beautiful, is on the point of becoming un-natural, artificial, almost in-human. It also makes the piece exemplarily Romantic. On the other hand, to put this melody over a kettledrum, not just rumbling, or occasionally accenting a cadence or reinforcing a crescendo, but actually singing a true note which is melodically and harmonically fundamental to the music as a whole is a very modern thing to have done - all the more so because it plays pianissimo as if it were an instrument whose former nature was to be brutally powerful and loud but now reincarnated as sensitive and song-like. (Ironically, we'd have to look back - to Beethoven's Violin Concerto of 1806 - to find any comparably bold use of this instrument before getting into our own century. After Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste (1936), examples are legion).

The periodicity imposed on song by the human need, periodically, to breathe is the absolutely basic structural device of music itself. It is what forces phrases, but cannot change the fact of phrase itself. Sooner or later, the voice must breathe; sooner or later the line must be broken.

Copyright © Peter Dale, August 15th 1999