Limitless Combinatorics. Eric Pettine postulates 'No Shortage of Melodies Anytime Soon', and offers some real hope for cynical musicians who think they've heard it all

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Some authors have claimed that certain melodies are innately likeable or that their tones may represent the mother's voice or heartbeat. Although we can't draw firm conclusions about what makes a particular tune likeable, one thing is for certain: humans definitely prefer some melodies over others and they continue to like the same songs, carols, rhymes and hymns from generation to generation. Perhaps one of the reasons several generations have revered and found meaning in the melody of Paul McCartney's song Yesterday could be because its melodic structure seems to perfectly mirror its narrative. When the lyrics are positive ('Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away ...') the melody ascends in a joyfully step-wise motion. When the lyrics reflect the singer's current situation of relative hopelessness ('Now it looks as though they're here to stay'), the melody becomes melancholic and moves in a step-wise descending fashion. But even without the lyrics, this song is still as potent and melodically meaningful today as it ever was. It seems the true, yet intangible, power is in the tune itself.

Musicologist Patti Whaley, in the essay Reality and Meaning of Music presented at the New Zealand Sea of Faith Conference in 1998, emphasized music's powerful intangible quality when she stated:

We perceive music as music precisely because it does convey meaning, because we hear it as an intentional pattern rather than a random occurrence.

What is amazing is that the listeners immediately perceive and comprehend certain melodies without having to comprehend the harmony and theory that allowed those melodies to happen in the first place. The experience is one where the listener can attach his/her own set of life experiences (mostly subconsciously/unconsciously) and values which ultimately make the music personally meaningful. And it seems the rules by which we attach a meaning to a melody are not/cannot be defined scientifically or from any other non-musical source: the rules are defined by the music itself.

Pinker never really seems to give consideration to the fact that most of the civilized world does not listen exclusively to melodies. Melodies are usually accompanied by harmony and that harmony is usually determined by chord progressions that are further controlled by a tonal center or key comprising a singular piece of music. When one utilizes specific notes of the harmonies to create melodies, it necessarily restricts the tones any given melody can possess. Similarly, once an author begins constructing sentences that abound from a particular chosen topic or theme, those sentences must directly relate or pertain to that theme in order to be comprehensible. To flit from one unconnected thought to another would make a series of sentences seem senseless and ludicrous. Consequently, given the above restrictions, there may not be as many possible meaningful melodies or sentences of the quantity that Pinker had intimated.

In the first half of the last century, Schoenberg and his followers unconventionally tried to spin off new melodies by eschewing the chordal syntax I've described above, and later by directly avoiding them through the application of twelve-tone technique. But their compositional practices never really caught on universally. Why was this? Maybe it was due to the fact that, as German composer Stefan Wolpe (who composed using Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique in the early 1930s) mused:

The music lacked a 'chroma' -- the constantly evolving and equidistributed twelve tones that leads to an overall homogeneous 'grayness' that cannot be broken.