Gertrude Stein’s Melodies: In Anticipation of the Loop

Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend (1948) offers an apt perspective on the notoriously unmelodious developments in the classical music of the first half of the twentieth century. In the novel narrator Serenus Zeitblom, an old-fashioned humanist academic, desperately seeks to come to terms with the new music and musical theories of the novel’s protagonist, Leverkühn, whose ideas are based on the work of Arnold Schönberg, and the birth of serial, twelve-tone music accounts for his rejection of harmony in favor of polyphony in the following terms:

I find that in a chordal combination of notes one should never see anything but the result of the movement of voices and do honor to the part as implied in the single chord-note—but not honor the chord as such, rather despise it as subjective and arbitrary, so long as it cannot prove itself to be the result of part-writing. The chord is no harmonic narcotic but polyphony in itself, and the notes that form it are parts.

(74)¹

Leverkühn’s refusal to honor the “chord as such,” his substitution of polyphony as dissonance for the narcotic effects of tonality, and his contempt for “subjective” appropriations of music point to modernism’s ambivalent relationship with the affective power of music.² When Leverkühn prefers the part (the isolated note) over the wholeness of the chord, he argues for an understanding of music as an affectless field of expression in which there is little room for a notion like melody, which, traditionally, connotes tunefulness and plenitude. Indeed, the exchange of affect and expression for a “chilly, rationalistic wisdom” is exactly what Oscar Bie—unaware of the ideological connotations twentieth-century history would bestow on melody—deplores about modernist music, which he finds “unable to admit even the semblance of melody” in the July 1916 issue of The Musical Quarterly (Bie 402).

If modernism is defined by its aversion to linearity, unicity, identity, and closure, and its fascination with the antipodal categories of disjunction, fragmentation, alienation, and process, then melody belongs to the former series. Melody develops in time and necessarily involves repetition and/or variation as well as changing patterns of duration that undergo various structural and textural changes. In order to qualify as a melody a musical segment must be perceived as a single entity by the listener because (and despite the fact that) it is repeated throughout the piece in identical or slightly different forms. In other words, the effects of the melody must be cumulative and detectable in a way that allows the listener to memorize it and appropriate it in a durable way. The main criteria required for such an appropriation of a melodic segment would thus seem to be (1) its (relative) simplicity and continuity within the segment/unit or, in the case of so-called “complex” melodies, its capacity to “detach” itself from other more narrative, impressionistic, or abstract parts; and (2) its repetition throughout the piece, which guarantees its “memorability” and ensures a perceptual response to a certain degree of regularity, familiarity, stability, and continuity. (It is necessary to repeat the melodic segment at least once to be able to isolate it from the rest of the piece; as such it comes close to the function of the leitmotiv or “refrain” [from the Old French “refraindre,” “to repeat”]). These features are basically what distinguishes, say, Deep Purple’s clear-cut theme in “Smoke on the Water” from the more disjunctive tactics of Boulez’s Marteau sans maître, in which the complex lacings and transitions between the musical lines defeat the listener’s attempts to isolate them and figure out where they begin and where they end. In the case of the Deep Purple classic, the “Smoke on the Water” passage is the “clou-motive . . . around which the rest of the melody is diluted, as if resting and waiting for the return of the motive” (Stefani 26). Melody, in other words, marks the affective rather than the analytical memory...