The Music of Hindostan c5.4

c5.4

But more imagination is needed to place ourselves at the point of view from which we may enjoy the method of early folk-song, that is, of melody conceived apart from harmony; and it is very difficult for those who have thought all melody with an underlying harmony, tacit or explicit, to accept it without harmony, except after long practice. Consequently they are seldom asked so to accept it; except for specialists, no folk-song is published without accompaniment. The problem is a difficult one, for if a harmonized folk-song, like a restored cathedral, is a persistent lie, yet a folk-song without harmony seems, at any rate for most of us, to fall to pieces, like a picture without perspective. There is another connexion between harmony and melody more intimate still, whereby harmony is no longer a mere adornment to melody which can be added or not, at will, but a vital factor influencing the actual structure of the melody itself. We may harmonize, if we please, 'Green Sleeves' or 'Walsingham' or the 'Agincourt Song' without doing them much harm; but if harmony, as we understand it, had been in the air these tunes could never have come to birth. A tune is just a musical sentence, paragraph, or chapter. And a sentence consists of important and unimportant words, and is not a string of dictionary words. In the same way a tune consists of important and unimportant notes, and depends for its convincingness upon a judicious management of these. But the principles upon which this ‘importance’ depends are different for melody and for harmony.