English musicians are fortunate to possess the word ‘tune’. In America, where writers on music have been brought up in the German tradition, they are obliged to make do with ‘melody’ on every occasion, whether they are describing ‘Sweet Polly Oliver’ or the Adagietto from Mahler’s fifth symphony. Americans are inclined to be scornful of our word ‘tune’, dismissing it as ‘a popular term for any clear-cut and easily retained melody’. But their nineteenth-century German teachers would probably have been grateful if they could have borrowed the word in their attempts to explain the difference between ‘melody’ and ‘melodies’. ‘A child’, wrote Schumann, ‘sings his melodies [i.e. tunes] to himself; melody, however, is developed later in life.’1

Tunes are not only clear-cut and compact and easily remembered: they are also self-sufficient, and can sound completely satisfying when taken out of a context. A melody, in contrast to a tune, is inclined to spread itself intangibly. It is less easily held in the memory, and, from its very birth, it can be so deeply involved in what is going on all round it that it is seldom willing to live an independent life.

When Schumann said ‘Melody is the amateur’s war-cry’, he must have been thinking of the innumerable music-lovers who had confessed to him that what they really liked was something with a tune in it. Schumann was one of the kindest of men, as well as one of the most enlightened of critics. He warned his own pupils in Leipzig to beware of despising the right kind of amateur, whose activities were inseparably bound up with the life of the professional artist. ‘There has never been a time’, he reminded them, ‘when art has really flourished without this mutual give-and-take.’ And he told his amateur listeners that he agreed with them that music without a tune was an impossibility: ‘If, having stripped a work of its elaborations, we can still find a pure melody … [then] the composer has passed the test, and we will pay him our tribute.’2

It is encouraging to find, more than a hundred years later, that Stravinsky has been saying almost the same thing to his pupils in California:

To members of an audience, the great advantage of a tune is that it can be whistled in solitude. Many listeners find that a tune is all that remains when a performance is over. If the composer has offered his tunes whole and undisguised, they can be taken away as possessions and held securely in the memory. If he has woven them into an elaborate texture, it may not be possible to take away more than a fragment at the first hearing. But the fragment will prove to be memorable if the work has been worth listening to, for it will be the kernel of the music, and at each new hearing it will expand and grow clearer in the mind, until it reaches the miraculous stage of living a life of its own.

In spite of all attempts at analysis, the vitality of a tune is a miracle that can never be explained. It can only be marvelled at, as Roger North marvelled when he wrote:

North has been criticized as a naïve and over-enthusiastic amateur, but he knew enough about music to play trio sonatas with Purcell, and in his notion of a fund ‘discovered and layd open’ he was already pointing out the need for Mr. Deryck Cooke’s The Language of Music. The ‘fetching out of the dark’ is a process that can be explored, for although the nature of a tune can never be defined in words, it is possible to make a list of a tune’s ingredients. One of the most exhaustive of the recent lists was made by Busoni in his ‘Attempt at a Definition of Melody’:5

The word ‘repeated’, coming at the very beginning of this definition of what we call ‘tune’, is a reminder of one of the many advantages that notes have over words. Words can be repeated on rare occasions for some particular purpose, but music thrives on repetition, and the same fragment can be repeated over and over again without losing its meaning.

Busoni’s sentence about the ‘row of ascending and descending intervals’ is not as clear as it might be, because he forgets to mention that the intervals can be step-wise or gapped, or a mixture of both. Cleonides, in the first century A.D., was able to be more thorough than this, when he described gapped intervals as a ‘network’. It is an admirable word, suggesting the patterns of sound in change-ringing, with each bell following its own course:

As raw material for making a tune, each pattern has its possibilities. When the changes are rung on F E D, the patterns gain a different meaning with the contrast between the tone and the semitone, and at G F E the new position of the semitone alters its relation to the tone and brings with it a new set of possibilities.

With four notes, change-ringing produces such a lavish supply of different patterns that it is almost bewildering to have to make a choice:

Ex. 1

The bar-lines in Ex. 1 are not real bar-lines: they are only marking the beginning of each row in the change-ringers’ column of numbers. The music of the bells follows its own laws and creates its own satisfying beauty. But the printed patterns in Ex. 1 can never become tunes until they are organized and persuaded to move rhythmically. An up-beat can turn their first eight notes into the opening of a chorale:

Ex. 2

With six-eight instead of four-four, and ‘Quick’ instead of ‘Slow’, the same eight notes can be transformed into the beginning of a dance:

Ex. 3

When Busoni described ‘a row of repeated ascending and descending intervals’ as ‘moving rhythmically’, the word-order in his sentence demanded a comma to divide the two ingredients of pitch and time. But these two are inseparable. It is just as difficult to separate the rhythm from the intervals in a well-constructed tune as it is to separate the butter from the eggs in a well-cooked omelette.

The patterns in Ex. 1 are among the simplest that Busoni had in his mind when he said that intervals must be ‘organized’ before they could turn into tunes. Being a composer, he knew that finding the right interval was a matter of skilled reckoning. Yet there are many music-lovers who mistrust the word ‘organized’ when applied to tunes. They believe that ‘the theme is a gift from heaven’. Their idea of a gifted composer is of one who writes in an emotional frenzy of inspiration: they forget that he is a practical man in very much the same position as that of a farmer or market gardener, who depends on his knowledge as well as on his instinct, and who knows by experience that gifts from heaven lead to a great deal of hard work and careful planning.

Planning involves ruthless pruning and selection. Everything has to be balanced and calculated. For instance, if the opening line of a chorale has to be built from the raw material of the patterns in Ex. 1, the choice of the first and second groups (Ex. 2) is not necessarily the best. The thirteenth pattern, followed by the third, might prove better:

Ex. 4

‘Better’ does not mean more pleasing in itself, but more suitable for the purpose. The chorale will need at least another six bars before it is complete, and these bars will want to extend beyond the range of the notes in Ex. 4, so the gradual rise from the lowest note may help to give a convincing shape to the eight-bar tune. And the drop of a fourth at the end of the first line of the hymn, coming after so many step-wise intervals, will emphasize the comma and help to make the form easy to grasp.

The purpose for which a tune is intended is one of the things a composer can never afford to lose sight of: it can prove to be his surest guide in the difficult task of calculated balancing. If he is a good enough composer, he will allow his knowledge and his instinct to work together in double harness, and the result of the process may well be what we call an ‘inspired’ tune.

Having insisted that the rhythmically moving intervals in a tune must be organized, Busoni goes on to say that a tune...