I was reading an interesting article in The Wanderer this evening called The Five Greatest Things about Polyphony by Jeffrey Tucker. I'm sort of a musical illiterate. I know what I like. My favorite classical composer is Bach, but I love Verdi's Operas and think Chopin must have had at least two extra fingers on each hand. But I know absolutely nothing about polyphony so I read the article with interest.
Tucker defines polyphony saying it is "music that employs several independent lines of music simultaneously but without using a dominant melody with accomplishment....there is no master/slave relationship." In modern music, he goes on to say, there is a dominant melody and everything else supports it. In polyphony, on the other hand, "no single voice dominates. Each part is important to the creation of the overall effect. You could say that that music is radically democratic, or socialistic, or egalitarian, perhaps individualistic, or orderly like the heavens, or all of the above....In polyphonic music, the angels are the voices." Wow!
At that point I was hooked. I put down the newspaper, hurried to my computer, did a YouTube search on polyphony and began to listen. It is, indeed, beautiful. I can imagine the effect of listening to it in a grand cathedral with terrific acoustics, eyes closed, being lifted on those angels' wings.
But the test is in the hearing. What do you think?
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