Do You Have a Musical Guilty Pleasure? Claim It
Harmony is melody’s bitch, with no life of its own. Hearing a melody a cappella, divorced from its harmony and expelled from its sound-world, is a kind of test. Does it still sound like music when it’s sung, just like that, by a civilian (an amateur)? The ultimate test: How does it sound when sung by your mother? If it passes this test, the melody indeed becomes the whole song—music’s synecdoche. All lullabies have passed this test; they’ve survived for centuries. They’re still here after capitalism, sleeping pills, and the invention of recording, never outgrowing their original p...
Source: thewalrus.ca
