Just rhythm, melody, and harmony?
- amoghdwivedi
- Nov 8, 2024
- 8 min read
Updated: Jan 26
Don't break my heart, Hank!
A lot of people seem wedded to the idea that music is defined by rhythm, melody, and harmony. I have come across interviews of Hank Jones, Billy Hart, Aaron Parks, and even Ben Shapiro, and all of them seem loyal to this trinity of musical elements. Although I love the music of Jones’ and Parks’ (I am yet to hear Hart’s, and have little interest in Shapiro), I think what they say about music is oversimplified, and strictly conforms to their narrow- albeit excellent- expressions in music.
This trinity bothers me for a few reasons. Firstly, the offered premise- that “music is rhythm, melody and harmony- is easy to expose by offering real-world counterexamples, as well as some hypothetical scenarios. Secondly, this worship leads to a slightly deficient sense of imagination in music. Thirdly, this reductive attitude towards music primes people to become dogmatic about the nature of music. Lastly, and more adventurously, I want to offer a better definition of music by reframing this very premise, and also try and tackle it from a linguistic standpoint.
Counterexamples
I will address my thoughts in the order I discussed them. The offered premise is, “music is rhythm, melody, and harmony”, and if sounds lack any one of these, then it is supposedly no longer music. It is fair to assert this premise, like it is fair to assert any other premise in life, but in order to test its reasonability, we can try thinking of various musical counterexamples, or hypothetical scenarios. If we then arrive at a conclusion that is seemingly absurd then we should realize that there is something unsatisfactory about our premise.
It is easy to address melody. A lot of electronic music I have heard has no melody. And yet I don’t think anyone would suggest these sounds are not music just because there isn’t an easily traceable string of pitches. Despite my own love for "cantabile" melodies, you will find that there are none in my own electronic music. I think one reason for that is melody is such a human affair, and good melodic expression is best saved for humans. Additionally, when you start programming music, you realize how much more potential there is for you to tinker with things besides melody, and it passively loses its allure. Although it is straightforward to play melodies in a DAW- you would just record things with a MIDI keyboard- programming a melody is a more awkward concept. It can be done, for sure, but the technique of coding music itself makes other endeavors seem way more appealing, and in my experience, it seemed more worthwhile to focus on musical elements like rhythm, tempo, timbres, modulations, sampling, etc. Other examples of music lacking melody in a conventional sense would include various (contemporary) percussion works which have no discernible attempts at creating melodies.
no melody 🤙
Harmony too is easy to address. I will not assume that people who worship this trinity derive their understanding of harmony in a Western, tonal-music, functional harmony sense, because that would instantly disqualify most non-Western ways of music making, and that would be too easy. Instead, I will try to be benevolent and assume that harmony refers to two or more pitch class sets being sounded at once. You don’t even have to go outside the Western tradition, or even to extremely contemporary music, to find counterexamples. Plainchant comes to mind. There is no harmony involved in that music. One can also imagine many solo pieces for instruments which are incapable of producing more than two notes. Although these pieces can often outline harmonic progressions, it is easy to imagine a piece which doesn’t do that, and is, let’s just say, pure melody or pure rhythm.
Lastly, rhythm. It is possible to imagine a one-note drone piece that doesn’t articulate any kinds of rhythms, but is developed through a lot of changes in timbre. Well, isn’t this an embarrassingly short paragraph.
Imagination
Next, to say that music is primarily the three elements in our trinity limits the imagination. While I love rhythm, melody, and harmony, I also wish to see music’s boundaries being pushed out of those basic three elements. It is a healthy experiment, and I prefer to live in a world that wonders and dares rather than one that does not. I remember my music teacher in school (slightly famously) outlined the various elements of music in our first session in grade 8. Our trinity was certainly on that list, but there were other elements too, such as form, timbre, articulation, dynamics, and perhaps the cleverest one- pitch. I love the distinction between pitch and melody. Even short percussive sounds have pitch- think many different wood blocks with many different pitches- but the word “melody” implies a more conscious organization of pitches, as opposed to an incidental one that you may seek to perceive in percussion music, for instance.
The inclusion of form is also crucial. Music is a temporal art, and none of the three in the trinity confidently acknowledge that. A string of melodies, a string of rhythms, a string of harmonic progressions, all organized cohesively across the span of minutes, capture our sense of musical experience much more accurately than merely serially presenting those three in isolation alone. Presenting the trinity alone is like saying a burrito is rice, beans, and a tortilla, and this is helpful only to some extent. But to contextualize it in a form, to say that you wrap mixture of rice and beans into a (hopefully) neatly tucked tortilla, is to portray it more accurately. The same can be said about rhythms- rhythms often take place in a metrical framework. It’s certainly valid to say taaa-taaa-tata-taaa is a rhythm, but what if we specified the overall metrical framework in which it took place?
After having been through many composition lessons and having been exposed to more contemporary works, I think it’s worth mentioning how modern music focuses more intently on timbre and dynamics, making our trinity seem lackluster in terms of its relevance at least in a modern context. A lot of ‘normal’ music typically has predictable melodies, simple repetitive rhythms, and tried and tested chord progressions. We all know this. But what we don’t acknowledge more often is how a lot of this music remains even more static and predictable on both a timbral and dynamic level. There are some notable exceptions- think dubstep and the timbres in it- but generally things remain uncontroversial. But if you choose to step outside the box, and try to focus more intently on those other neglected elements, then that can give way to creativity in your work.
never thought I would feature two conservatives in the same blog post
Dogmatism
Out of the names I mentioned before, the most devout worshipper of this trinity of elements is Jones. Somewhat shockingly, he says that if it doesn’t have any melody, harmony, or rhythm, then it’s no longer music. It hurts to hear that because it reflects a dogmatic attitude which seems so contradictory to the grace and refinement of his own art. Would Jones think a lot of electronic music is not music, because there’s no melody? That Gregorian chant is not music, because there’s no harmony? That my hypothetical one-note drone piece is not music, because it doesn’t have any rhythms? What is the reason for this hostility and seemingly wanting to invalidate forms of musical expression that are distant to your own? Is it a matter of upbringing? Of education? Or maybe even upholding tradition and therefore espousing a reactionary definition of the “purpose” of music in society? Who knows!
Having a dogmatic attitude towards art to me makes me uncomfortable. It suppresses people’s inner creativity and probably leads to an ugly kind of emotional repression. I have never felt it, and feel grateful to live in the times I live in, amongst people who support me; but even imagining not being allowed to pursue my “inner voice” makes me shudder. It is true that not all people have to deeply enjoy all art. You can have opinions, reject what you dislike, stick to what you like, and you can change your mind too. But it’s best to leave those creators of music alone to make what they want to hear. Funnily enough though, I think making weird music and truly owning it makes you have a stronger spine, and allows you to avoid taking other people’s dogma too seriously.
Reframing the premise
If I had to improve the premise, while keeping its general contents and spirit, I might just say that rhythm, melody, and harmony are sufficient conditions for what constitutes music, but not necessary ones. Another approach might be to say that music has a primary and secondary definition. Since a ton of music snugly conforms to focusing on this trinity, it is not totally unreasonable to say that music is primarily rhythm, melody and harmony. In addition to that, what if we added a secondary definition and said, anything else that is consumed and conceived in a manner close enough to music, as defined by the primary definition, is also music? In simpler terms, what if an audience gathers around to hear a completely melody-less, or rhythm-less, or harmony-less performance, and treats it they would treat any other musical performance? What if the creators of the “music” intend for it to be consumed as music too? Since the creation and consumption of that performance is so similar to music as defined by the primary definition, we might as well call it music.
I am borrowing this thinking from some debates I watched about sex and gender. The issue is not about scientific realities, or declaring deductive premises, but rather about issues of using language. If you’ve watched enough sex/gender debates you will no doubt have come across the opinion which holds that any human with a penis is a man, and anyone with a vagina is a woman. Again, kind of like our rhythm-melody-harmony premise, it is a fair premise to have, but all you need to do is look at the world around you and see if your premise is helpful or not. I like the idea of using a primary-secondary definition for the term “woman” for instance. Primarily, in order to conveniently reflect the world around us, we can say that a woman is someone who has primary and secondary sex characteristics found in "biological" women. Secondarily, any individual who holds traits similar enough to this primary definition woman, is also a woman. This easily accommodates trans women, for instance. The idea is that using language- here, using the word “woman”- is not prescriptive, but rather descriptive.
"light reading", as Hermonie Granger put it
Something in my brain doesn’t add up about calling trans women “men”- if you saw someone walking down the street dressed in a t-shirt that says “girl boss”, a skirt, with long hair, wearing makeup, walking in high heels, with a handbag, etc., would you really check their genitals in order to see whether you can call this individual a “man” or a “woman”? The term “woman” just seems so much more descriptive of what you see, what is presented to you as an observer, and how that relates to your schema about the term itself. Prescriptive definitions do nothing to help us, and language can evolve with time and context. So, if you saw a group of performers and an audience which is listening to sound intently, would you really check whether there are rhythms, melodies, and harmonies is the music? Isn’t the scene so descriptive of music anyway? You might as well call it music!
Closing words/outro/conclusion/thanks for reading
It is hard to say what music will look like a few centuries from now. But it may not be completely silly of me to say that a lot of the ways in which we think about music- and assert things like, “music is rhythm, melody, and harmony"- are exclusive to the times we live in and the traditions we happen to be inculcated with. I am grateful for all the exposure I have had to various kinds of music in my life, because it lets me conceptualize it in a multitude of ways, and not just one. That makes me receptive to the idea that music, sound art, whatever you want to call it, embodies a great deal of flexibility, and also a potential for evolution- and so should its definition, and its defining traits. I will certainly spend a great deal of my musical career learning more about melody, rhythm, and harmony, and still dream of getting better at improvising cantibile melodies in 4/4 strictly diatonically in the key of C- but I know that’s not where my musical conceptions end. Hopefully, far, far away from it.
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