Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Over on Reflections in d minor, Lynn has a nice article about the first musical instrument: the human voice.

(What follows involves a lot of simplification and glossing-over of technical points. So, if any of my readers happens to be a professional musician or has a Ph.D. in Composition or Performance or some such thing, don't lock-and-load with both barrels. Please oh please.)

There is a sense in which all instrumental music consists of attempts to simulate the human voice, and the terminology really drives the point home: instrumentalists are often said to be "singing" through their instruments, and young instrumentalists are constantly being advised (if their teachers are any good, that is) to listen to good singers and study the way they use their voices to shape and shade their music. The simple truth is, you can't be musically aware if you're not well-versed on the working of the human voice. That's a point that I didn't really understand until I attended a summer music camp late in my high school career. I had already been practicing my instrument (the trumpet) for years, but it wasn't until that camp that I was required to participate in a choir. The change of focus was exhilarating. Singing honed my musical ear, both in terms of intonation (a basic requirement of any musician) and in terms of phrasing (what, in large part, differentiates between a competent musician and a good one).

What is "phrasing"? Well, music -- in large part -- deals with melodies. But melodies aren't mere collections of notes so as to produce an appealing tune; a good melody will actually consist of several distinct phrases, and phrasing is simply learning how to tell one musical phrase from another, and being able to make clear in the course of performance where one phrase ends and another begins. This isn't as easy as it sounds.

Take a famous melody -- the great chorale theme of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for instance. As you hum it to yourself, you'll probably find yourself taking a natural breath between the fourth and fifth bars. Not a full, deep breath, but a short snatch of air. You'll do this for two reasons: (a) you probably can't hold enough of a breath to sing all eight bars, and (b) given that, the natural place to breath is at the midpoint. Now, the "natural place" for that break won't be in the exact middle of every melody, and this is partly why it gets harder to perform more modern works of music: the phrasing is less obvious. But it should be clear that the origins of phrasing lie in the demands of the human voice, and simply in breathing while singing.

Sir Georg Solti, who is probably my favorite conductor of all time, made this exact point in his Memoirs when he wrote about how, since he had learned conducting in the opera world, that when he came to symphonic conducting he still approached entirely-instrumental works from the standpoint of singing, looking for those natural breaks. It's those "breathing spots" that allow music to take life. Music performed without such "breaks" in the melody tends to sound very unconvincing and mechanical. (This is the case of a lot of Baroque music, because the focus in those times was not on melody per se but on counterpoint and line, which is part of the reason why Baroque music is difficult for modern ears: we are accustomed to Classical and Romantic norms of phrasing. This is also true of improvisational jazz, where the phrasing can resemble a "stream of consciousness" type of thing, which in a sense it is.)

It's odd that the sense of phrasing, which is intimately connected with breathing, is almost never to be found in young musicians. It has to be cultivated, and it's harder to develop a fine sense of phrasing than it is to develop mere technical proficiency. That's why young wunderkind virtuosos are fairly common, but young great musicians are not. It takes time, years of exposure to great musicians, before the sense of phrasing starts to develop. From my own experience as a wind instrument player, I remember comparing lung capacity with my fellow band members. We'd brag about how we could get through an entire strain of a Karl King march, with both repeats, on a single breath. And we had the most supreme admiration for those freaks-of-nature who could circular breathe. (That's the ability to continue to play a wind instrument while taking more air in, at the same time. It wasn't until I got to college that I realized that circular breathing wasn't some mystical ability but a skill one could learn, and a nearly useless one, too.) We never realized that doing so shackled the music. A dance isn't just motion; it's a blend of motion and non-motion. Likewise, music isn't just tones arranged artfully: it's a blend of tone and silence, of exhaling and inhaling.

Now, composers have their own ways of helping with the phrasing: they can employ rests and fermati, for instance. But in large part, the responsibility of phrasing falls on the shoulders of the performers. They have to figure out where and how the music should "breathe". This applies not just to soloists, like a pianist, but to entire orchestras. And then the difficulty of conducting becomes clear, because it's much harder to find the correct phrasing when you have eighty or ninety musicians all playing at once. Hell, sometimes it's hard just finding the melody in the first place, much less worrying about how to phrase it.

So that's why the human voice is so important to the course of musical history: because all instrumental music relies not just on the voice's sound, but on the voice's necessity for breath.