They Never Get Music Theory Right

Readers of this blog know how much I love Patrick O’Brian’s tales of Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin and their sea adventures during the Napoleonic wars. Part of what makes these books so enjoyable is O’Brian’s lofty mastery of so many subjects. It’s not just that I know now from reading these books what a binnacle is or an orlop or what it means that a ship is close-hauled. O’Brian filled his books with the vocabulary and ideas of espionage, Linnaean taxonomy, nineteenth-century medical practice, economics, colonial social etiquette, flora and fauna of the sea and of a thousand-and-one islands, cookery, Latin poetry, prisons, charlatans and mountebanks (both elected and self-made), and many, many other topics.

Naturally, one of the most interesting of these threads to me is the music that Jack and Stephen play. The reader of one of these twenty volumes never has to wait very many chapters before the two friends pull out their instruments and set their hands to a piece by J. C. Bach or Albinoni or Arne. In reading Treason’s Harbour this month, I learned afresh of a composer that I surely had heard of before, since this was my second reading of the novel. Jack mentions Johann Melchior Molter in a terrible pun, suggesting that the duo play the “Molter Adagio.” Always hoping (but failing) to be as witty as he is courageous, Jack laughs uproariously at his own joke (which sounds more like the Italian tempo marking “molto adagio” in his British accent than it does in mine). So surely an author who can invent bad puns using the jargon of music knows music really well, right?

*sigh* They never get music theory right. I remember once hearing a very intelligent speaker, in drawing an analogy from music theory, say these words or words very close to these: “Playing only on the white keys is like making a black-and-white line drawing. But using the black keys adds color to the picture.” I don’t remember what larger point he was making; maybe he was trying to emphasize the importance of peripheral ideas (like espionage, biological taxonomy, medicine, and economics in an O’Brian novel!). But whatever his point was, it had nothing to do either with music or with visual art. Tragically, this very intelligent man made a mistake by trying to make himself sound more intelligent than he was with an analogy outside his normal expertise.

Alas, the analogy was outside of any expertise at all. Lets set aside the construction of the analogy, construction so poor that the listener gets confused trying to figure out how the black on the keyboard doesn’t correspond to the black in the drawing but instead refers to red and blue and green. Let’s set aside the huge problem that this very intelligent speaker believes that all paintings are essentially cartoons, with color filling in black outlines. Set those issues aside, and we still have a huge, essential problem. The music theory in the analogy makes no sense because it fails to recognize any music other than music in the key of C major. Yes, notes outside the basic scale of a key are called “chromatic” because, in a beautiful bit of poetry frozen into music’s terminology, they are said to add color. Surely my speaker had heard this observation and had tried to assimilate it, but he did so without understanding that black keys aren’t necessarily chromatic. In the key of E, for instance, F-sharp, G-sharp, C-sharp, and D-sharp are normal parts of the scale. We might even call them “natural” notes in that scale, while F-natural is not natural in the context but chromatic. (Hey, O’Brian taught me that a hawser is cable-laid, not hawser-laid. So, please, just let music theory have its own consistent inconsistencies.)

And this presentation is not an isolated case. When the New York Public Library Desk Reference came out in the 80s, I thought of buying it until I turned to the musical section. If the book didn’t know how to explain sharps (again with the sharps!), how could I trust it on anything else? Believe me, when a speaker or author not professionally trained in music theory uses music theory in an analogy or even dares to say something directly about music theory, I pay attention. And based on my experience, if you come across a musico-theoretical analogy from someone who doesn’t know who Gioseffo Zarlino is, odds are 50-to-1 that it’s wrong.

And now the point of the post. Yes, Patrick O’Brian made a mistake involving music theory. Stephen and Andrew Wray are speaking in a friendly way (this is before Stephen finds out who and what Wray really is!) about some Ambrosian chant they have heard at a church in Malta. “No grace-notes,” says Stephen, “no passing-notes, no showing away.” Wray adds: “And no new-fangled melismata either.” At that I’m already pulling my hair. But when I turn the page and read, “They talked about modes, agreeing that in general they preferred the Ambrosian to the plagal,” I drop my head and moan to the departed author, “Oh, woe is me! Oh, O’Brian! Oh, woe!”

While finding “passing-notes” in monophonic melody involves a good degree of subjectivity, medieval Christian chant – both Gregorian and Ambrosian – certainly employs them. Neither is the melisma, a series of pitches sung to a single syllable, a rare occurrence in Ambrosian chant. Google “Ambrosian chant” and glance at the first few images that pop up for proof. Melismas aren’t “new fangled,” either. (In the context of misunderstanding the melisma, even O’Brian’s use of the Greek plural form, “melismata,” grates on me as a pretension designed to feign expertise.) In fact, the tenth century saw the beginning of a trend in which performers “troped” many melismas, meaning in this case that they added new text to the traditional melody, singing one syllable for every note in what had been but was no longer a melisma. So far, O’Brian’s errors might be said to fall into the realm of historical musicology rather than music theory. But then he has to mention modes. “Ambrosian” is not a designation of a type of musical mode, to begin with. As a result, to explore more deeply in the dark cavern O’Brian has dug himself into, plagal modes cannot be opposed to Ambrosian modes, since they don’t exist; rather, plagal modes are opposed to authentic modes.

A thought occurs to me. A dreadful thought. My apostrophe continues: “Ai! Ai! And lack-a-day! Patrick O’Brian! Why must thou attempt that which is beyond thee? And if thou hast thus erred concerning music theory, do I indeed know that a hawser is cable-laid?”