Memorability

[John_Boyer]

Reviewers who disparage unfamiliar composers will frequently say their themes are not memorable.  But how memorable are many of the themes of the established composers?  Some are, of course, but most are not so much memorable as just familiar.  And even then, some composers hardly wrote any memorable tunes.  I can't hum a single tune from any of Beethoven's quartets and only one or two from the sonatas (basically, those with nicknames), though I have heard them many times.  I'm not knocking Beethoven, only suggesting that the unmemorable argument is a false one.

And what happens when an unsung composer does write a memorable tune?  He is criticized for being a facile tunesmith.

You can't win!

[Alan Howe]

Oh, absolutely! That's how Raff gets it in the neck all the time from critics who think his facility in writing memorable tunes makes him unworthy of serious attention. And then they criticise Draeseke as unmemorable or too difficult to bother about because they haven't listened carefully or long enough to 'get' him.

As you say, you just can't win.

[Ilja]

What I find is that there's a lot of deductive reasoning going on in music criticism: if it's been written by Beethoven (Brahms, Mahler, etc.) it must be good, so everything sounding like, or constructed like, a Beethoven work, must be good – and, by implication, anything else must be bad. This is also the reason why composers with a very diverse oeuvre always are a bit of a problem among critics and musicologists – say, Mendelssohn or Richard Strauss. Or why outliers in an oeuvre (e.g., Beethoven's Pastorale) get assessed so inconsistently.

Unfortunately, this attitude pervades not only criticism but also education. If you tell generations of musicians Beethoven was uniformly brilliant, it comes to define brilliance itself to the exclusion of other voices. Combine this with the unfortunate tendency in a lot of critics and musicians to define works as either "perfect" or "unworthy" and you can see where things start to go awry.


And I think Beethoven is a particularly good example when it comes to tunes; a lot of them are unmemorable or even outright banale - take the opening theme of the 5th symphony, for instance. But it is not even that important to him; it's what he does with it that makes his music. Which may explain why an emphasis on melody and tune-craft has been treated with disdain the way that it has in people like Raff.

[Alan Howe]

Thing is, Raff does both - he writes tunes and knows how to develop his material...

[badams@nl.rogers.com]

I agree, as has already been stated, that the issue of unmemorable tunes is neither here nor there since the composer's genius is so often revealed in what he does with his thematic material.  But one of the reasons I'm so "into" unsung composers is because of these brief, glorious moments when listening to a piece for the first time and you are suddenly struck by a heart meltingly beautiful theme that sinks into your consciousness and never goes away.  I know there's more to "serious", "classical" etc music than pretty melodies, but never knock the ability of melodic beauty to draw you into a composer's orbit.

Brian

[Alan Howe]

For me it has to be both - memorable material, brilliantly developed.

[Double-A]

Of course the discussion has now shifted from memorable tunes (a melody of a certain length, say 8 measures or more, may be hummed as John Boyer suggests) to memorable material (may be rhythmic, harmonic, melodic, even instrumentation, or any combination thereof and may be very short indeed, not necessarily hummable).

Schubert's a-minor (Rosamunde) quartet, beginning of first movement:  The tune there, taken on its own is not especially memorable but the whole opening is unforgettable:  The rhythm in the two lower voices, the legato quavers in the 2nd fiddle and the melody combine to a whole that one would not predict from seeing the elements separately.  The whole thing of course is the material.

Or looking at the quoted example of Beethoven quartets:  You may not find too many memorable tunes (though surely more than zero!--how memorable a tune must be to qualify is of course in the eye (ear?) of the memorizer) but plenty of memorable material IMO (beginning with the opening motif of op. 18/1!).

[MartinH]

I think the issue here is one of how our individual brains process it. I hear a tune once and have it completely memorized and can write it out on paper without hesitation. Other people can't conceive of someone doing that. Some take repeated listening to memorize a tune. So what's not memorable to them is easily memorable to me. I've often read reviews of things like the Glazunov symphonies where they like it while listening, but as soon as it's over it has left the brain. Well, not for all of us who have phonographic memory. For me, the trickier issue is what makes a great tune. Some of my favorite tunes in the symphonic literature are often trashed by critics as being banal and feeble. Like the clarinet melody in the slow movement of Balakirev's First. The center section of the 2nd movement of Tchaikovsky's Manfred. The drop-dead beautiful trumpet tune from Goldmark's 2nd. The slow movement of Raff's 3rd. I love those tunes; I can't see how anyone could disagree, and yet too often they're labeled "unmemorable".

[Double-A]

I don't think "memorable" is a word that literally means "able to be memorized" in its normal usage.  Rather like "deserves to be remembered".  Similarly for "forgettable" which means: "Forget it quickly, please!".

[eschiss1]

True: after all, having more or less memorized, I think, a fair amount of one or two of Beethoven's quartets without actually  trying, I can confirm they're "memor[ize]able" in -that - sense. I'd maintain the other too, but ...