Thanks For The Melodies

In the course of a very interesting interview with Lord Andy in the Independent, Ed Seckerson makes this comment about His Lordship's tunes:

"It’s what I call the emotional memory of these melodies that give them such dramatic potency"

Hmm, "emotional memory". Interesting phrase.

It's often said that the best tunes are the most memorable ones, the ones you wind up humming involuntarily at the end of a show. There's a good reason for this. In essence melodies are memories. Unlike harmonies, melodies can only be heard one note at a time so to "hear" a complete melody is essentially to "remember" the order of a series of notes. That's why a good tune is a memorable one and vice versa.

But why the emotion? In the dramatic context Lord Andy tends to structure the story around the tunes. The tunes and their repetition give shape to the drama. In Phantom the relationship between Christine and the masked man is first expressed in the song "Angel of Music". At the melodramatic unmasking during the show's climax the same melody is heard again but because the relationship has changed and developed we hear it differently. As well as expressing the mood of the moment the restatment of the melody is also a reminder of how far Christine and the Phantom have travelled. It has "emotional memory".

It's a technique that lies somewhere between musicals and opera: more sophisticated than a simple Broadway reprise but still a long way from Wagnerian leitmotif. It's bold, upfront and fairly unsubtle but very, very effective. Lord Andy understands as well as anyone how melodies carry with them memories and emotion, even the memory of emotion. That can be a powerful tool for a theatre composer.