While You Were Following the Tune

A few weeks ago, I went to a party. I’m talking a proper club: DJ, drinks, some of it outdoors and very hot, some of it indoors and extremely sweaty.

Beforehand, the organisers posted a rather militant list of dos and don’ts on Instagram, although it was mostly don’ts. There were quite a lot of rules, and I did find myself imagining a particularly grumpy social media manager sitting somewhere typing them all out. But the one that really stayed with me was: ‘Don’t bring main-character energy.’

Apart from being a very Gen Z phrase, and I am definitely not Gen Z, it struck me as a slightly odd request. What sort of character energy were we supposed to bring instead? Supporting character energy? Anonymous person standing near the bar energy? Aren’t we all, to some extent, the main character in our own lives?

It did make me think about music, because we tend to listen in much the same way. There is nearly always something that feels like the main character: the soprano line, the soloist, the melody we remember afterwards. Our ears are naturally drawn towards it. It is easier to follow, easier to hum, and usually sitting right there at the front of the music.

In the wonderful documentary The Only Girl in the Orchestra, the double bassist Orin O’Brien talks to a group of young bass players about needing to feel comfortable in a supporting role. The bass player may not have the tune, but without them the whole thing can lose its shape, its weight and its foundation.

And that is true far beyond the bass section. A huge amount of what makes classical music what it is happens underneath the melody. The accompaniment gives the music its texture, colour and emotional direction. It can tell us where we are, what is happening around the main character, or even what that character is thinking but cannot say.

Change the harmony under a melody and you can completely change its meaning. Put a different rhythm beneath it and suddenly the whole scene moves at another speed. Sometimes the accompaniment is doing so much storytelling that the melody is almost only half the picture.

So this week, I want you to try not to listen only to the main character. Don’t ignore the melody completely, obviously, but see what happens when you shift your attention slightly downwards. These are 5 pieces in which the accompaniment is not just there to support the story. It is telling one of its own.

Schubert was only 17 when he wrote ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ in 1814, setting a scene from Goethe’s Faust. Gretchen has been seduced and abandoned by Faust, and we find her sitting alone at her spinning wheel, unable to think about anything else. The song begins:

‘My peace is gone,
My heart is heavy;
I shall never, ever
Find peace again.’

It is quite a dramatic opening for Schubert. There is no introduction and no time to settle in. Gretchen is already trapped inside the thought.

Now try, for a moment, not to listen mainly to the singer and concentrate on the piano. The right hand turns continuously, creating the circular motion of the spinning wheel, while the left suggests the treadle moving beneath Gretchen’s foot. You can almost see her carrying on with the task automatically.

But the accompaniment is not only the wheel. It is also Gretchen’s mind, circling endlessly around Faust: his walk, his eyes, his voice and, eventually, his kiss. When she remembers that kiss, the piano stops completely. Gretchen has become so lost in the memory that she has physically stopped spinning.

When the wheel starts again, it does not immediately return to normal. The piano hesitates and stumbles back into motion, as though she has momentarily forgotten where she is. By the end, the wheel is still turning and Gretchen is still thinking the same thoughts. The accompaniment gives us both the room she is sitting in and the prison inside her head.

Another of Schubert’s most famous songs, ‘Erlkönig’ asks one singer to portray 4 characters: the narrator, a father, his terrified child and the Erlking himself.

The father is riding through a forest at night with the boy in his arms. The child insists that he can see and hear the Erlking calling to him, while the father keeps trying to explain everything away. What the boy sees is only mist; what he hears is only the wind; the figures in the trees are only old willows. But the Erlking becomes increasingly threatening, the father rides faster and, when they finally arrive, the child is dead.

Before the singer has told us any of this, the piano has already thrown us onto the horse. The right hand plays rapid repeated chords almost constantly, while the left drives the music forward underneath. It creates the pounding of the hooves, but also the panic of the journey.

It is famously exhausting to play, and that physical effort is part of the drama. The pianist barely gets a rest because the father cannot stop. Even when the Erlking sings gently and seductively, promising the child games, flowers and beautiful clothes, the galloping continues underneath. The voice may sound reassuring, but the accompaniment tells us not to trust it.

Imagine the same vocal lines over a slow, calm piano part and the whole song would become something else. The terror is not only in the words. It comes from the feeling that the music is rushing towards an ending it cannot avoid. When the piano finally stops, it is not a relief. The journey has ended because there is nothing left to save.

After the 2 Schubert songs, Herbert Howells’s ‘King David’ feels like entering a completely different world. Howells wrote it in 1919, setting a poem by Walter de la Mare about King David overcome by a sadness he cannot explain.

David cannot sleep and nothing seems able to help him. He calls for 100 harps to play, which feels like quite an impressive attempt at cheering yourself up, but even that doesn’t work. Then a nightingale enters the garden and begins to sing. David looks up into the trees, hears his own grief reflected in the bird’s song and listens until, gradually, his sorrow lifts.

The piano begins with a soft chord containing a slight dissonance. Nothing is dramatically wrong, but something is not quite at rest. Before the singer has even explained how David feels, the accompaniment has already placed us inside his melancholy.

When the poem mentions the harps, the piano breaks into gently plucked figures, creating the sense of all those strings. It is beautiful, but beauty on its own cannot reach David. Then the nightingale arrives in the high notes of the piano, with little phrases that begin to answer the singer.

Suddenly, the accompaniment has become another character. The voice gives us David, while the piano gives us the nightingale he is listening to. As the song continues, the unsettled harmonies begin to resolve, until the final chords feel calm, warm and almost regal. David has not simply been distracted from his grief. He has heard it expressed by something outside himself and has finally been able to let it go. If only it were always that easy.

‘The Swan’ comes from Saint-Saëns’s The Carnival of the Animals, written in 1886. The full work is a musical collection of animals, although Saint-Saëns stretched the definition slightly. Alongside lions, hens, tortoises and elephants, there are fossils and pianists practising their scales.

Most of the piece is comic. Saint-Saëns borrows other composers’ music, slows Offenbach’s famous can-can down for a group of tortoises and generally enjoys himself. He was worried, though, that the work might damage his reputation as a serious composer, so he refused to allow most of it to be published during his lifetime. ‘The Swan’ was the one movement he permitted to appear on its own.

The cello is clearly the main character. It plays one long, graceful melody that seems to glide effortlessly across the music. You hear it and immediately picture the swan moving calmly over the surface of a lake.

But listen to the piano underneath. Its arpeggios (the broken chords) never stop moving, rising and falling like ripples in the water. The cello gives us the bird itself, poised and apparently weightless, while the accompaniment gives it somewhere to move.

There is also something wonderfully revealing in the contrast. Above the surface, everything looks calm. Underneath, there is constant activity. It is that familiar image of a swan appearing completely composed while its feet are working furiously below the water. The piano does not draw attention to itself, but without it there is no water, no movement and, really, no swan.

Ravel began thinking about his Piano Concerto in G after touring the United States in 1928, where he heard jazz in Harlem and met George Gershwin. You can hear that influence across the concerto, especially in the bright, restless outer movements. The second movement, however, seems to drift into a completely different world.

It begins with the piano alone. The left hand plays a steady accompaniment while the right unfolds a long, calm melody above it. The concerto was performed last night at the First Night of the Proms by Yunchan Lim (has anyone tuned in?), and I heard him describe this movement as being like a mermaid. And I totally get it. The music has this strange liquid quality, floating freely while something is always moving underneath.

Listen closely to the pianist’s 2 hands. The left keeps a steady pulse in 3: one, two, three, one, two, three. It is consistent and grounding. The melody in the right hand, however, seems to experience time differently. Its phrases stretch across the bar lines and often avoid landing where you expect them to.

The 2 hands are playing together, but they don’t quite feel as though they are thinking together. The left knows exactly where the beat is; the right seems barely interested in it.

You might imagine that this would sound unsettling, like 2 people talking over each other, but Ravel makes it feel completely natural. Because the accompaniment holds the structure so firmly, the melody is free to wander. The left hand creates the current, and the right hand floats over it.

That is the magic of the movement. The melody does not sound free because there is no pulse. It sounds free because someone else is quietly holding the pulse for it.

Perhaps the point is not that the melody matters less, but that it never tells the whole story on its own. Sometimes the thing that moves us most is happening underneath: the rhythm that keeps running, the harmony that refuses to settle, or the quiet figure that changes how everything above it feels.

So next time a piece immediately gives you something obvious to follow, try listening just below it. You may find there is another story there altogether.

Have a great weekend! x