Polyphony

In the period in which synthesizer made the dream about creating music just from any sounds on the verge of becoming true, most of the people still thinking about music as being sung or played by various instruments, the dream of electronic music was both more pure and unattainable-looking than today, when we are accustomed on thinking about music as using various sounds. The main aim was, creating music that stands true to the new sounds and new abilities of synthesizers; to create beauty as much as possible exactly from what cannot be done without a synthesizer; and this music to be as unusual and new in its construction as the instrument and sounds themselves were new.

Maybe most important novelty on compositional level brought by this attitude is the authentic orchestral approach. While classical music has its orchestral, symphonic department, it is still based on solo playing of separate instruments. For that time, electronic music is the first music to have an entirely orchestral approach to music.

When I was listening to JM Jarre's Oxygene 1 for first time, I remember being excited and surprised with that unusual thing -- everything was floating around with no melody and nothing firm to stick to. The music was coming “all at once”, like a unified, unison musical idea, with no linear idea – melody – being at the base, dominating it. Yet there was an unambiguous sense of direction and development, of melodicism in some more general sense; it was not bland and music-less as would be expected. Without a singable tune in its base, this piece was doing everything that music should do. It was seemingly impossible, but it was happening.

If we were to say what music is, what makes us feel something as music, we would probably say it is something that we can sing or whistle. That is our basic idea of music and melody, and prototype of all basically melodic music. Yet this idea about music that is “parallel”, consisted of many different layers that all together form music, is old as music itself and is called polyphony. Music that uses many multiple melodies and layers, as opposed to that which uses or concentrates on only one layer, is called polyphonic as opposed to homophonic (or monophonic, if only one voice is actually heard). Throughout the classical tradition, polyphony is usually referring to polyphony in baroque counterpoint sense, which stands as the most evolved sort of polyphonic music, as opposed to more basic melody+accompaniment, “homophonic” kind of music. This Luther’s speech, that Bach was very fond of, greatly captures the why of baroque polyphony and counterpoint:

But only when natural singing is statistically advanced and polished, we understand great wisdom of God in His incredible work, music. At that we especially have to admire how other voices are bending and dancing around the basic song, and embellish it with various sounds. As they are dancing in some heavenly dance, voices tenderly meet, pet and hug. On this world, maybe, there is no greater miracle than such singing intermingled with numerous voices. Who doesn’t feel nor joy, or love, nor excitement with such wondrous deed, he must be as hard as a rock and is not worthy to listen to real music, but wild screaming of corals or howling of the dogs.

The essence of baroque polyphony, as we can see, is in elevating music from natural singing to more complex, divine architecture and deeper impact. Baroque polyphony was about counterpoint that essentially comes from echo; a melodic line reacting on another melodic line. As we can see from Luther's description, all melodic lines except one are the ornament for that one, leading melodic idea. I remember from the times of programing music on Amiga computer using sound tracker, how I came in touch with a few famous Bach's pieces, and especially admired something that I didn’t know how to refer to -- a mesmerizing way on which Bach would use a background sound from time to time to add something to the melody that is playing on top. The result would be a more beautiful kind of melodicism, and of kind that puzzled me. But it only “kind of puzzled me”, because I could still see the bottom of the thing. The point with JM Jarre was – there was seemingly no bottom.

The most noble dream of polyphonic music, and polyphony in true sense, is music that is completely parallel, not based on linear melodic idea in its base in the first place. Musicality should appear from interaction of layers, and not from any of them in isolation. All meaning should emerge from collaboration of layers, without any of them dominating. Individual layers of polyphonic orchestration can be uninteresting for themselves, but becoming substantial in context. To use mathematical language, the main characteristic of this kind of music is that different layers of music are linearly independent – they do not give a hint of each other.

Baroque polyphony is obviously still not core polyphony - even with most dense baroque counterpoint writing, music was essentially leaden by a single melody. Essentially, it follows our idea of music as a single tone. One would doubt that music with any elemental power whatsoever can exist without a linear melodic line dominating it, since people are linear thinking by nature – our idea of time is linear after all. Regardless of how many sounds are heard simultaneously, human ear naturally tends to concentrate on a single dominant tone in every given moment, and that tone gives out the main leading idea to a piece. The rest is embellishment for that leading tone.

The sort of music that escapes this evolving around a single leading tone was somewhat hinted in classical tradition, maybe the most famous among such pieces being Satie’s gymnopeide piece (the famous one). Yet it did not quite escape basic melodicism.

Idea about non-linear music was in subconsciousness of many musicians during 1970s, and it was almost articulated by Brian Eno with his ambient music:

We are no longer concerned with making horizontal music, by which I mean music that starts at point A, develops through point B and ends at point C in a kind of logical or semi logical progression. What's more interesting is constructing music that is a solid block of interactions.

What still misses here is insisting on firm structure and clearly cut development.

This then leaves your brain free to make some of those interactions more important than others and to find which particular ones it wants to speak to. Brian Eno

But the essence is exactly in not having this freedom to choose paths and float – that actually cheapens and destroys a piece. A piece of art must have a clearly cut and defined idea, its “message”, its “emotion”. The way you hear a non-linear piece should be as definite as the way you listen to a melodic piece; only its impact is more of a spatial, ethereal, hypnotic nature.

In fact, what really interests me is a combination of horizontal and vertical where it would be possible for both of them to exist at once, that's an experiment in progress, hopefully what happens is what my next record will sound like. Brian Eno

This experiment was actually already done in that moment – it was how JM Jarre's Oxygene sounded. It can be taken for the first polyphonic music in truest sense of the word; a big step that musical art was always going towards and was bound to take. Actually, strictly speaking, it was already taken in Javanese ethnic music, greatly admired by Claude Debussy.

In western music, the solo female singer would typically be the most prominent and important part, and all other instruments would accompany her. However, in Javanese gamelan music, no part, even the singer, is considered more important than the others. All instruments and singers weave their parts together to form a complicated counterpoint in which no one instrument or singer is featured above the rest. Brent Hugh, article "Claude Debussy and the Javanese Gamelan"

But since Javanese gamelan doesn't include a synthesizer, we can calmly ignore it (a joke).

In its structure and the way it comes to a listener, Oxygene 1 opening could be compared more with a sculpture rotating, constantly in a way remaining in place, but showing different facets, as opposed to the usual idea of a composition evolving somewhere. As in cubism, here multiple faces of the same thing are shown. In a way, time becomes multi-dimensional; this might confuse a traditional musician, but is probably familiar to a computer programmer. In programming, this is called concurrent programing. Programmers know that our minds have great difficulties to solve even most basic problems in this area. The basic algorithm for one of the most basic problems in concurrent programming was found 17 years after another, longer, algorithm was used; and the new algorithm (called Paulus algorithm) consists of only three lines of code.

It is presumably even more difficult to solve such problems in music. In music, these constructions, while looking simple, are probably the most difficult for human brain to muster. They are not complex in a sense of having many parts, but it is very difficult for a human being to think of them. They sound as came out all at once, from nothing. The very basic, atomic idea, that can not be broken down to more simple one that still makes sense, is here complex. One always wonders when hearing such a piece (although they are very rare for now), how something like that, so parallel in its impact and construction, appeared from the blue in someones head? It doesn't sound like human playing, but like basic elements of sound organized in an geometricized, multi-dimensional loom. There is no starting point to take notice of… When piece is broken apart, none of these parts looks too interesting. How could someone discover that they become so interesting together, that they are actually a part of a uniform multi-sounded piece?

This 'detachment' of different layers of music from each other is sometimes referred to as heterophonic character.

In music, heterophony is the texture where the various voice or parts are differentiated in character. This can refer to a kind of complex monophony in which there is only one basic melody, but realized simultaneously by multiple voices, each of which play the melody differently, either in a different rhythm or tempo, with different embellishments and figures, or idiomatically different. This can also refer to polyphony in which the various voices are different in character, whether in melodic shape, mode, rhythmic profile, or tempo. The term was invented in systematic musicology as a subgrouping of polyphonic music, in which separate melodies are played simultaneously . The term heterophony was coined by Plato and is used in many areas of the world. Morton (1978) suggests, at least for Thai music, the term polyphonic stratification. Wikipedia

Along these lines, opening of Oxygene could be analyzed as being basically an evolving heterophonic texture, in which minor chords are clashed against rising scales of sound. However, it is wrong to perceive this kind of music as “a texture”. Texture is a sort of escape pad for classical musicologists; everything that music is and that doesn’t fit into basic musical theories is grouped under “texture”. In electronic music, texture is only referring to polyphony of timbres. But in the case of Oxygene 1 we are talking about heterophonic character in more abstract, melodic sense: this is non-linear music, why calling it texture? This is simply music that broke away from being a series of happenings down a single time-line.

In different words, this non-linear character can also be understood as being an outcome of greater contrast between the layers of music. This goes for most abstract parts of music – melodic, harmonic and rhythmic – as it goes for textures and sounds. Texture-wise, there is this greater contrast between layers of sound, so the span of music is closer to the span of cacophony of sounds of our ambient, which is pure contrast. This is what we usually refer to as “ambientality” of a piece. What makes this “ambiental” approach work, sound as music, is overwhelming harmony that makes up for greater contrast. Subjectively, it sounds like harmonized, musicalized natural noise, like the world itself started to sing. But if there is not enough harmony to make up for the contrast, the piece will not remain articulated and end up sounding bland and semi-chaotic – most of pieces sticked with “ambient” etiquette are like this; loosely structured pieces where contrast overweights harmony. They usually end up being based on rhythm&noise logic, although with no aggressive sounds – so all together they sound true to “acoustic wallpapers” etiquette.

This necessity to achieve much harmony in polyphonic approach is what will principally drive composer to use more delicate sounds, which don’t separately draw too much attention on themselves, so that relationships between them become emphasized and they can be put in more complex relationships. It’s like reaching for gentler sounds only to be able to more effectively clash them. This is what lends Oxygene its spirit-like, ghost-like sonority, and in the same time power; its gentle power comes from complexity of relations, rather than from particular sounds.

There is an idea of creating pieces that evolve on a way of becoming more and more highly defined and harmonic, reaching musical highlights, and then returning to watered-down, ambient phases, and then again condensing; like following how music is being born from noise and than dissipates back into it, to become music again.

Polyphonic approach can be viewed as a direct outcome of universal music, pure composing, inner composing, and maybe is the most clear proof of the question we also discussed, that our inner idea of music is not so tightly connected with what we can bodily produce. Since we have only one voice, when we make music with it, it is consisted of a single sound that goes through pitch evolution; but in polyphonic music, the reason why we feel it as music obviously is not because it corresponds to our bodily ability to sing it, but because it corresponds to our inner sense of music.

Chord progressions by rule play the major role in polyphonic music, since they are the most parallel, “vertical” aspect of music, rather than counterpoint that is essentially more a horizontal device. In Oxygene 1, JM Jarre finds a way to use chords as a part of an even more general kind of harmony; to put them into a more general harmonic context than bare chord progression. Instead of using chord progression Fm Gm Cm D7 to couple it with melody, creating a homophonic piece, Jarre finds a way to put it into a more harmonic context, using uprising scales, creating a piece with no linear base, no melody, yet being melodic in a more general sense of the word. Plain scales from Oxygene 1 could seemingly only serve as an ornament, but here the composition is lost without them.

Such an unusual and provoking form poses many questions. Will we ever be able to grasp its laws, rationally deconstruct it like we can with traditional music? All of this is probably the reason why this approach had so faint echo in musical rhetoric and practice, despite JM Jarre on his first albums did manage to go out with a number of such pieces.

While it is very difficult for human beings to think of such compositions, there is nothing new about art not being easy. Trying to make it easy by inventing firm rules that can be followed in order to compose was never how art was born. One should try instead to refine his intuition for the form, of what rational understanding is only one part. Composing is not calculating; one has to naturally think and feel through this polyphonic writing, to have intuitive, emotional ideas in these forms not based on melody in conventional sense, on the same way as with melodic writing. Simply, this polyphonic writing must not be artificial and manipulative, but true expression of human imagination. Lines by Ralf Waldo Emerson may paint this:

In any multifariousness of actions there is coincidence if every is honest and natural and comes it’s proper time. Since they originate from the same will, all actions will be harmonic, may they look very different/…/ one aim is uniting them all.

What brings layers together stands in some distant point outside of layers themselves, and which is nothing else but this multi-dimensional idea of the piece.