A History of Melody, Bence Szabolcsi. Published in English by St. Martin's Press, New York, NY, in 1965. Translated by Cynthia Jolly and Sára Karig. Originally published in Hungarian as A Melódia Története in 1950 by Corvina Press, Budapest, with a second edition following in 1957. A German edition entitled Bausteine zu einer Geschichte der Melodie appeared in 1959.
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In Szabolcsi's preface to the English edition of his book, he explicitly states that his book is not meant to be a cohesive whole, nor is it meant to be a complete statement. He says that "it is intendedäto be a mere fragment, a first sketch of a great work that has not yet been written and can hardly ever be completed." As such, his book consists of one very lengthy and several shorter essays on the nature and history of world melody.
The main section of the book is the one lengthy essay. It is a historical survey of melody and melody-types. Its ten chapters are each devoted to one broad historical period, from primitive prehistory to modern times. Szabolcsi's "modern" refers, of course, to the early twentieth century up until the middle 1940s. That he wrote the book primarily during the years of World War II limited his ability to analyze and discuss much of the music of his contemporaries.
The main section focuses on European art-music, almost to the exclusion of anything else. The first two chapters necessarily discuss a broad range of musics, as there was no such thing as European art-music in the ancient and prehistorical societies. The remaining chapters are an aesthetic description of melody over time. Szabolcsi is not attempting to prove anything in these chapters, and does not provide much in the way of in-depth analytical or musicological investigation. The language that he uses to describe the tunes he chooses is often colorful, in a very flowery, expressive, and sometimes comical style.
Some quotations illustrating his verbiage are in order here. Referring to Binchois, Szabolcsi says that "his chansons are full of unconstrained, secular gaiety,"[1] and of the transition to the early Baroque that
The appendix is where Szabolcsi's musicological thoughts (and writing style) become more engaging. It is a collection of five separate essays on various aspects of melody. "Speech and Melody" is a discussion of the interrelationship bewteen speech-intonation and melody, and the origins of the latter in the former. "The Maqam Principle in Folk- and Art-Music" is a sweeping discussion of the principle of variation and improvisation within a framework that is Szabolcsi's most thoroughly argued writing in this collection. In this article (and the following one) he discusses a great deal of music from outside the European art-music tradition, which was sorely lacking in the main body of the book. An attempt to deduce the origins of pentatonic musical systems is made in "Pentatonicism and Cultural History". "European Regions of Ornamentation" and "Music and Geography" are somewhat less remarkable, although the latter does declare that a culture's development is dictated in a large part by its geographical environment (a proposition with which I wholeheartedly agree).
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Szabolcsi's book is strange in that he does not maintain one theoretical standpoint throughout.[4] This may be an artifact of the disjointedness of the book, or it may be a result of an actual change in opinion during its composition. It is impossible to determine which. The most glaring example of this theoretical shift has to do with the stance that he takes on the development of pentatonicism in various world cultures. In the main section of the book, he declares unequivocably that pentatonicism was clearly a universal stage in the development of the world's musical languages. Yet, later, in "Pentatonicism and Cultural History", he backs down from this proposition. He points to the obvious contradiction that some cultures show absolutely no trace of pentatonicism, while others have a flourishing pentatonic tradition even in modern times. Three possible solutions are proposed, and are accompanied by possible objections:[5]
By far the most interesting essay in Szabolcsi's book is the one dealing with "maqam principle". In this chapter, Szabolcsi defines "maqam principle" in a much broader sense than that which the word "maqam" typically is. To him it is the variation principle, a worldwide tradition of music in which the individual performer has near-infinite control over the final realization of a tune or piece. The basic skeleton - the words and the general pitch outline - of a song is all that is laid down. The performer is free to change rhythm, dynamics, and tempo, and to add ornamentation as he wishes. He relates a brief episode in the Hungarian fieldwork of one Pál Járdányi, in which a gypsy in Gyergyóalfalu told the author that "it can also go like this." This statement has its limits, however. Hungarian village singers do not recognize a tune as the same when it is sung with different words.
It would seem, however, that this maqam principle is not present in art-music. Yet even here, the freedom involved in Szabolcsi's version of maqam are alluded to, or even explicitly acknowledged. He believes that there are three relevant realizations of maqam principle in art-music (although, again, he makes no mention of art-music outside the European tradition). A speical case may be Wagnerian leitmotif. It could, concievably, fit into any of the three following categories, although it is probably more of a combination of all of them. The first is the encouragement of musical types. This is much like the spontaneous folk-creation of village singers, in which each performance is a unique and fleeting creation conforming only to the basic skeleton of the melody. In the bel canto period, when singers were taught improvisation, an artist would perform his showpiece differently every night. The same aria, yet changed in each particular instance.
Variation technique has, of course, never been foreign to the European composers. This is the second realization of maqam principle. The great composers, from Bach to modern times, have all written sets of variations. Even in the Renaissance, composers varied, elaborated, and adapted Gregorian chant melodies, and constructed polyphonic choral works around them. The Lutheran chorale genres reached their height in the eightteenth century in the Chorale-Cantata, Chorale-Fantasy, and Chorale-Passion. Beethoven, Brahms, and Rachmaninov wrote dozens of variation sets. Liszt, Wagner, Mahler, Scriabin and Bartók all were masters of transforming themes into the unifying elements of huge musical forms. The spirit of maqam principle is inherent in the idea that melodic change can be accomplished while maintaining the original identity of that melody.
Thirdly, the obvious declaration that a composer cannot help but be a product of their time can be extended even to the melodic details of his music. Whether intended or not, a composer will resort to common and prevalent melodic patterns of their time. This can be clearly seen with the example given of the famous menuet from Mozart's Don Giovanni, which bears a great deal of similarity to melodies by da Capua, Piccini, de Majo, J. C. Bach, Paisiello, Guglielmi, and even other works by Mozart himself. In this context, Szabolcsi mentions a sort of "lifelong motive", which a composer will work with over his entire career. Szabolcsi mentions Mozart, Beethoven, and Bartók in this context, but does not supply the motives to which he is referring. A quote would have been helpful to his argument, but I can see the direction in which he is heading. I would add Mahler to this list, who, over the course of his musical life, made repeated use of two characteristic figures, generally sounded in the strings (as are most of Mahler¹s most important musical-emotional statements).
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It is difficult to speak of this book in terms of theory or methodology, since it is not a cohesive whole, and was written over a long period of time. Szabolcsi is clearly interested in finding the universals of music, or at least of melody. While he acknowledges in his preface that this book is not intended to be a complete statement, he lacks a certain rigor in his explorations of melody, for two reasons.
The first reason is his lack of fieldwork. While fieldwork is hardly necessary for the discussion of European art-music, when discussing folk music or the music of non-western cultures, it is almost a necessity. Given the time period in which he was writing, he can perhaps be forgiven for his reliance on collections of others instead of his own eyewitness, but his cause would have been better served by waiting until travel and fieldwork became easier in postwar years. The biggest problem that I have with his approach is the lack of universality, despite the fact that Szabolcsi obviously believes that such universals can be convincingly determined. His book was, by all accounts, indended to be a history of world melody, yet the disproportionate amount of European art-music discussed within its pages belies that intent. This is not to say, of course, that Szabolcsi should have spent his life travelling around the world collecting melodies in order to deduce the universals that he seeks, for this is impractical for any number of reasons. Rather, it seems that he should have been more proactive about seeking the data which would support his hypotheses about world musical evolution.
The other reason is his near total lack of analysis. Even Szabolcsi's most in-depth analyses are cursory and superficial, especially in his initial discussion of pentatonicism. Later on, in his essay on pentatonicism in the appendix, he appears to be using analysis to support an a priori conclusion about the interrelatedness of various pentatonic tunes and traditions. In the main body of the book, most of Szabolcsi's discussion of his chosen melodies is so couched in vague, impressionistic, and aesthetic terminology as to be almost totally useless as a convincing musicological discussion of the history of melody. In addition, this book was written before passing personal judgement on one's subject of discussion became taboo (for the most part) in the academic community. When discussing Schoenberg's foray into dodecaphony, Szabolcsi says that "composers such as Berg or Bartók who came into contact with this very speculative system recognized its threatening blind-alley much quicker than did Schönberg [sic] himself, and left it much earlier."[8] This statement, in addition to being unacceptably judgemental, is blatantly incorrect. Berg, once he adopted it, never stopped using the twelve-tone system (like Schoenberg did), and Bartók never adopted it at all. What Szabolcsi percieved in Bartók's music to be dodecaphonic is unknown, but perhaps he was simply unable to otherwise make sense of works like the Fourth String Quartet or Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta.
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These objections beg the question of how, exactly, a history of melody should be approached. This is an enormous and difficult question, and would probably merit an entire dissertation of its own, to say nothing of the actual implementation of whatever solution is proposed. I personally find this question a very difficult one to answer, given that I do not believe either in musical monogenesis or musical universals of the meaningful sort. But I will make an attempt at a cursory answer to the question nonetheless.
The first and most obvious solution is to broaden the scope of the melodic investigation. Multiple melodies from every world tradition must be examined, if any convincing conclusion about the history and development of the musics of the world is to be reached. Much like linguists have reconstructed the proto-languages of several of the worlds language-families, it is probably possible to "reconstruct" (in a slightly different sense than linguistic reconstruction) a proto-music of one or two of the main "dialects" of world music. Perhaps there are melodies found in distinct but adjacent cultures that can be traced back to a single source-melody that was shared by multiple cultures at some point in the past. This would be an exciting prospect, and would perhaps incite musicologists and ethnomusicologists to truly take seriously the idea that some previous stage of melodic language could be convincingly reconstructed, in a sort of muscal palaeontology.
Beyond this, the question gets far more complicated. How would one go about making generalizations about melody, a pursuit of infinite variability? Even if we were to limit the scope of our investigation just to European art-music, how would one come up with a theory that can explain the melody of Josquin, Gesualdo, Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Scriabin and Messiaen all at the same time? I am, to be honest, not even sure if such a thing is possible, but even if it were, it would take a lifetime to complete. In short, I don't really have an answer to the question of how one should approach the history of melody, beyond the practical considerations stated in the paragraph above.
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Given its weaknesses, the specifics of Szabolcsi's book are not terribly relevant to modern musicological or ethnomusicological pursuits, especially in light of the vast amount of research, fieldwork, and analysis that has been done in the past half-century, and which addresses many of the points which Szabolcsi is attempting to make. That he even attempted to address such a vast topic is far more important. Unfortunately, no one has taken up the tacit challenge to pursue Szabolcsi's intent to its logical conclusion: a complete history of music, whatever that may entail.
My first reaction to this book as I began to read it was one of utter disgust, given the nature of some of Szabolcsi's assumptions about the historical development of musical systems, and not a few historical inaccuracies. The most glaring was the assumption of a worldwide linear development of tonal systems from three-note to pentatonic to diatonic to chromatic. That he at one point was forced by the data to posit a "period of chromaticism" between pentatonicism and diatonicism was proof that such a linear development was a historical impossibility. In the first chapters of the book, it became clear to me that Szabolcsi was not well informed about Classical Greek music, and that he assumed that the theoretical construction of what would later become the chromatic system was in actual practical use in ancient times. According to some of the ancient theoreticians of the time, this is not true. Ancient Greek music was highly complex. Based on stacked tetrachords, it conformed to neither pentatonicism nor diatonicism, but rather a free system of flexible scales, many of which involved quarter tones, large intervallic gaps, and scale-spans larger than an octave.
As I finished the main section and moved into the appendix, and got over my initial annoyance with those objectionable assumptions, it became quite enjoyable, and Szabolcsi made several good points. It would be interesting to see what he would have written had he continued the work on this topic that he alludes to in his preface to the English edition.
Notes: