The dreamlike and fantastical effects Rimsky-Korsakov had aimed at, however, had already been pushed forward further by the French. Satie became famous for such 1890s works as
Gymnopédie no. 1 and
Gnossienne no. 1, relying on suggestive, haunting repetitions and hints of novel and Oriental scales and harmonies; the latter is even written without a time signature or bar lines, to encourage freedom of interpretation for the performer, who is prompted now and then with suggestions written above the notes like “Wonder about yourself”. Even more radical is some of the work of Debussy, such as his 1894
Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune – this does feature considerable motivic development, but does so in a way that gives the appearance of improvisation, and the harmonic contour of the piece is largely static, rather than progressive, with extensive use made of the whole-tone scale, smooth variation between 9/8, 6/8 and 12/8 metres, and continual changes in timbre, which in addition to adding colour and variety also helps obscure the melody, by passing melody and accompaniment from instrument to instrument to declarify each line. This piece is often considered the symbolic beginning of Modernism in music.
This use of timbral variation as a substitute for harmonic progress is perhaps nowhere better seen than in Ravel’s 1928
Boléro. This controversial piece (Ravel was deeply insecure about it, and worried that orchestras would refuse to perform it) provides a rhythm (played continually throughout the piece), a repeating accompaniment pattern, and two simple melodies, each of which are repeated eight times, followed by a slight variation in the final bars of the piece. However, each repetition (and the finale) is given its own orchestration, yielding 17 different timbral soundscapes in total, and this variation in timbre, combined with insistent rhythm and a gradual crescendo is able to produce around a quarter of an hour of thrilling music out of the rote repetition of a few bars of tune. Although the harmonies and melodies are conventionally Romantic, the piece represents, structurally, a point at which the structural thinking of the last 300 years has been set aside.
A parallel end-point can be found in the works of Scriabin, who pushed tonality as far as it could go. Here, there is no lack of progress, but it’s such a pure and contextless, directionless, form of progress that he finds it hard to sustain for long. Among his most accomplished works are his late (single-movement) piano sonatas, like the
Black Mass (Sonata no. 9), in which (as is typical for the composer) yearning unease mounts from quiet dread up to full-blown panic attack.
I’m not going to attempt any grand narrative of the 20th century. However, following Debussy, Scriabin and Mahler, a key early point of divergence is early Stravinsky, and in particular the revolutionary The Rite of Spring, his 1913 ballet, which provoked a riot on its debut. It begins with the relatively peaceful, if disconcerting and discordant,
Introduction, but mounts to numbers like
Dance of the Earth, with its manic energy, overwhelming trumpets, and earthquake-effect percussion. Though the pounding rhythms (often involving shifting accents to force the appearance of syncopation) and grinding harshness of the sound in some places suggest a mechanised world, the scenario for the ballet (a series of scenes illustrating a fantasised “Pagan Russia”) is overtly atavistic, and that indeed is how critics reacted, one rival composer despairing that “all human endeavour and progress are being swept aside”. It’s not truly atonal, but it is discordant, and has been analysed as ‘bitonal’ – frequently, two different keys are being used simultaneously. In any case, its terrifying energy and defiance of conventional norms turned it into a historical punctuation mark, the most important and (for a while) famous piece of music of the 20th century. His style can also be seen in smaller pieces like the following year’s
Three Pieces for String Quartet, which make clear why musicians were immediately seduced by Stravinsky’s heresies: while little of the sound produced may be considered “harmonious” or “tuneful”, the energy and passion (particularly in the first movement with its irregular accents creating a pulsating rhythm) are undeniable.
While Stravinsky was breaking things, Schoenberg (who had begun his career as a reasonably conventional Late Romantic composer) was building them up, essentially throwing away almost all the Common Practice and reconstructing music from the ground up according to mathematical principles. Having passed through a period of “free atonality”, he and his followers developed “serialism” (specifically, the form known as “dodecaphony”). This too provoked riots – one particularly contentious concert, having been interrupted by repeated fistfights in the audience, had to be entirely abandoned (the concert organiser was prosecuted for assault; testifying, one witness congratulated him on the punch, as it had yielded the most harmonious sound of the evening). The result of Schoenberg’s experimentation is... often surprisingly inoffensive, actually, as in
Klavierstück Op. 33a, which beneath the atonality retains some good appreciation of rhythm and texture. His followers took the method in more confrontational directions, as in Webern’s
Variations for Orchestra, Op. 30.
Despite these and other experiments, the early 20th century is associated with some of the most popular ‘classical’ music, as ‘nationalist’ composers combined late romantic techniques and orchestras with a commitment to approachability. In the Classic FM Hall of Fame, for example (a UK-wide listener-voted ranking of popular pieces), the first four most popular pieces were all composed betwen 1899 and 1914. [the top-ranking pieces are currently by Vaughan Williams (twice), Rachmaninov, and Elgar; Sibelius, Holst and Shostakovich all have works in the top 20]. Rachmaninov’s
Piano Concerto No. 2, for instance (here the second movement) displays a talent for lyrical melody that wouldn’t shame Schubert, and is unabashedly tonal, yet is also unmistakably modern, particularly in its rich harmonies and long, flowing melody that continually strives for something it can’t attain. An even longer melodic line is found in probably the world’s most popular piece of ‘classical’ music, Vaughan Williams’
The Lark Ascending. Here, Vaughan Williams looks to new scales, in this case pentatonic scales, and experiments with breaking down the traditional language of music – the violin solos in this piece are notated without mensuration, encouraging a freer, more individual performance. Yet these innovations are yoked to a conservative, even neoconservative language that locates the music within a conventional, and specifically British, musical tradition. Similarly, his
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis is rooted in a national tradition of music, reaching back to borrow a 16th century tune by Tallis (author of the Spem in Allium), and orchestrating it in a peculiar fashion that seems to harken back to the Baroque (there a three groups of different sizes, from a string quartet up to an orchestra, and they are intentionally seated apart from one another to augment the passing of music from one to another). And yet the piece could not possibly have been composed in either the 16th or 17th centuries, or even the 19th.
The reactionnary movement in music was particularly good at turning out energetic concert pieces, like Vaughan Williams’
English Folk Song Suite (the first movement here turning an old song about a soldier sexually propositioning a teenage girl into a fine imperial marching tune), or Sibelius’ tub-thumping
Karelia Suite (intended to imitate something of the feel of folk music, though not actually drawn from folk tunes), or Soviet film music like Shostakovitch’s
Finale from the Gadfly Suite, or the spine-chilling cavalry charge of
The Battle on the Ice, from Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky. Yet these composers were also capable of more serious and challenging music. Sibelius’
Symphony No. 7, for example, is a masterpiece of continuous melody that defies formal description, combining intense organic development of motifs with seemingly liberated shifts in emotional direction – indeed, it was originally described as a “Fantasia sinfonica”. The
final movement of Vaughan Williams’ 6th symphony is remarkarble for its bleakness, extremely quiet throughout and commanded to be “without expression” – it’s commonly been interpreted as a response to Hiroshima, although the composer himself suggested a broader theme of the smallness of human life. Shostakovich, in works like his
Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and Strings combined modernism with populism, with a hint of the jazz that frequently attracted him; but he was also capable of greater brutality, as in
the 2nd movement of his 10th symphony, widely considered a musical portrait of Stalin, or in his harrowing
8th string quartet (here, the 2nd movement), believed to have been originally intended as a suicide note, and prominently featuring
a knocking motif that is widely thought to represent the NKVD disappearing so many of his friends and family (and his own arrest).
Other composers drifted further from the conventions of ‘classical’ music to embrace folk traditions. Béla Bartok, in addition to collecting many genuine folksongs, often combined elements of modernism with elements of folk music, such as in his “Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm”, demonstrating, for example,
Bulgarian (4+2+3)/8 time, and
Bulgarian (3+3+2)/8 time. In the US, composers like Gershwin (for instance in his pentatonic opera aria
Summertime, or his
Piano Concerto (here, the 3rd movement)) and Ellington (as in his ballet suite,
The River (here the 4th movement)) synthesised the classical tradition of their teachers with the music of the cosmopolitan professional musicians of the American cities (which in turn drew from African-American and Eastern European folk traditions). More authentically “African” styles of classical music, however, could be found in Latin America, as in Roldán’s
Two Ritmicas, which looks to Afro-Cuban polyrhythmic traditions.
After WWII, there was a second wave of avant-garde modernism, which particularly involved extensive development of serialism, increasing the rigidity of some aspects (making more and more of the music automatically generated from algorithms) while broadening the definitions in other ways (retreating from strict twelve-tone composition into compositions composed from smaller sets). Pierre Boulez’s
Structures Ia displays an extreme serialism, in which both pitch and note-duration are governed entirely by pre-determined structures, and the composer’s contribution to the mathematical calculations that produce the composition are extremely limited. Stockhausen’s
Kontakte attempts to go further, reducing dynamics and timbre to similar mathematical sequences, as well as pioneering the use of electronically-generated music. Stockhausen’s work in turn gradually turned toward the inclusion of stochastic calculations, a direction known variously (depending on your sect) as aleatory, aleatoric, aleatorial or indeterminate music. For example, John Cage’s
Music of Changes was composed by using the I Ching as a random number generator. His
HPSCHD is more brutal in effect – theoretically the result of using computer algorithms to randomly select notes from pre-existing classical works using an I Ching random number generator, I can’t but wonder whether it’s really an experiment to see whether harpsichords can induce epilepsy. (The original 5-hour performance was also accompanied by continually changing flashing images). Xenakis’
Pithoprakta represents a different sort of randomness: it is ‘composed’ as a stochastic chart of probabilities, the actual realisation of which in sound is not determined ahead of time, so that each performance is unique. Cornelius Cardew’s
Treatise is even more extreme – a purely visual composition, each performer must determine for themselves on each occasion how they wish to ‘interpret’ the piece. The highlights of the genre may be Cage’s “4’33”, in which the performer is silent and the random coughing and fidgeting of the audience provide the content, and “0’00”, the original version of which simply instructs: “In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action.” Later versions made clear that the one disciplined action that could not be tolerated was the performance of any piece of actual music.
These directions in music were controversial. Even early serialism raised serious questions as to whether audiences could really distinguish the result from random notes; post-war serialism seemed to make that possibility vanishingly small, to which aleatoric (etc) music responded by embracing the randomness. Indeed, composers like Boulez intentionally aimed at producing music that showed no pattern or repetition of any kind. This, however, doesn’t really matter, because Modernism inverts the traditional narrative of composition: no longer is the work about the audience – how they feel, whether they like it – but rather the thing of importance is the composer, and their struggle to create the work. If the work is unlistenable cacophony, that does not matter, so long as the composer has followed some (ideally scientific and mathematical) process in producing it. This is, in a way, the end result of the revolution brought about by Beethoven, who reframed the composer from being a skillful craftsman to being a spiritual hero – freeing the composer from all necessities of craftsmanship is the natural conclusion of that process. It also, conveniently, removes the burden from the composer of possessing any sort of talent, skill or imagination, and reconfigures the artist as a celebrity. It did have the downside of destroying almost the entire audience base for ‘classical’ music (composers like Vaughan Williams and Sibelius remained incredibly popular through the first half of the century, but faced such condemnation from the artistic community that few were willing to risk the ostracism that would come with following in their footsteps), but that wasn’t seen as necessarily a bad thing: an artist who could only be ‘understood’ by a tiny clique of other artists was surely far more artistic than one so base and passé as to be enjoyed by the multitude – who, around this time, largely headed over to new forms of popular song genre popularised by the new recording technologies. The last ‘classical’ music to hit #1 (for a record 9 weeks!) in the charts in the US was Max Steiner’s 1959
Theme from ‘A Summer Place’.
A further significant development occured, however, in New York in the 1960s, when a group of young American composers – chiefly La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, John Adams and Philip Glass – revolted against what they interpreted as the un-Americanism of the European-derived avant-garde, a horrified, traumatised music of the post-Holocaust continent that they saw as unrepresentative of modern American life. With some inspiration from Cage and his more extreme indeterminate experiments, as well as from earlier experiments in electronic and tape music, the new cohort, dubbed ‘Minimalists’ attempted to strip away both the layers of complex theory and the hugely complicated soundscapes that the avant-garde were producing at the time, producing a music of small ensembles, simple harmonies, stasis (in place of the constant change that came before), and obsessive repetition. Young, the most avant-garde was particularly associated with drone music, often with a Middle-Eastern inflexion, as in
The Fire is a Mirror by Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music collective (the extent to which this was the product of Young himself, rather than his collective as a whole, is apparently a matter of debate), or even more radically
The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer or
Trio for Strings. His magnum opus, however, was the epic
Well Tuned Piano (a piece that changes with each performance), which, while pleasantly listenable-to (a prepared piano, rather than high power electric wires screaming), concentrates the listener intently on each note. Terry Riley went further in bringing minimalist and avant-garde procedures to the realm of attractive sound:
In C returns, in a way, to tonality, the entire piece being written statically in C Major – except that, rather than being ‘written’, In C is created from a bit over 50 pre-written modules, which the performers select from according to certain guidelines. Unlike much earlier aleatoric music, however, In C is able to sound both pleasant and coherent, because its randomised elements do not disturb its constant C Major tonality (or its obsessive pulse, a common feature of minimalism).
Steve Reich began with a focus on tape music and ‘phase shifts’ (playing the same phrase in two instruments at slightly different speeds, causing the music created by their interaction to slowly shift). An early, extreme form of this is seen in
It’s Gonna Rain, Part II; a later instrumental example is
Electric Guitar Phase (a re-orchestration of Violin Phase from the ‘60s). His later works include such things as the magnetic
Eight Lines, and the remarkable
Different Trains, a three-movement work for live string quartet, recorded string quartet, tapes from real interviews, and recorded train sounds, in which melodies for the instruments are directly derived from the natural intonations of the recorded interviews (a technique called ‘speech melody’); the piece begins with reminiscences of train travel before the war, moves to recollections of the trains of the Holocaust, and returns to America with the words of Holocaust refugees mixed with those of Americans (Reich spent long hours riding trains during WWII, travelling between his separated parents; being Jewish, in hindsight he was haunted by how different those journeys might have been for him had he been born in Europe rather than America). The piece is weird at first, but, like much minimalism (originally known as “the New York Hypnotic School”) becomes surprisingly addictive. Alternatively, a piece like
Music for a Large Ensemble shows Reich in a shallower but more immediately attractive mode.
Adams and Glass moved further beyond strict minimalism, returning to the incorporation of more tonality into their music. Glass’
Violin Concerto (yes, here transcribed for saxophone, because sue me) was intentionally written to be popular (and has succeeded) – brooding and agitated, yes, but basically harmonious; the Prelude to
Akhnaten shows his trademark nauseous arpeggios, but the
Funeral of Amenhotep III from the same opera conveys a scene of situation and emotion that would be recognisable to the Baroque, even if his complex drumming rhythms would not be.
Akhnaten and Nefertiti develops into a genuinely moving and passionate love duet (the lyrics, incidentally, were found within a royal mummy from the Amarna period). There is perhaps a sense that while this music would have seemed odd to Mozart, it might have made more sense to Machaut. Similarly heartfelt is Adams’ aria,
Batter My Heart, from Doctor Atomic, while
Short Ride in a Fast Machine hints at a reunion of minimalism with conventional music – it has the repetitions and pulse of minimalism, but it also has a form of tonality and harmonic progression... not, perhaps, conventional tonality, but a definite sense of movement from one chord to another (what Adams does is gradually add and subtract notes to a chord until it has mutated into an entirely different chord); there is also a functioning fanfare near the end, and something approaching a traditional cadence to end. Meanwhile, as though trying to have things both ways, there’s Adams’ Grand Pianola Music, and particularly its final movement,
On the Dominant Divide – composed, ostensibly, as an “ironic” parody of traditional music, filled with over-the-top musical clichés like honest-to-goodness actual emotional harmonic resolution, it has become un-ironically popular among a general audience that doesn’t really understand that it’s the butt of the joke... and yet one wonders, given just how whole-heartedly (and succesfully) Adams throws himself into the “irony”, whether a part of him might actually, terrible as it may be to suggest, might himself enjoy it!
An even more neo-conservative (musically!) form of Minimalism has come to be known as “Holy Minimalism”, as most of its composers are of a deeply religious or mystical disposition, particularly associated with the Orthodox churches (although Eastern European Catholics and Baptists, pagans and mystical agnostics are also found). Holy Minimalism (as with Minimalism in general, most practitioners deny the validity of the label) tends to re-introduce more melodic and tonal elements, while keeping characteristic features of Minimalism (simplicity, repetition, a constant pulse (though typically much slower than in America), a kind of hieratic stasis), and being more open in recognising the similarities between their Minimalist practices and those of the Middle Ages (sometimes even reintroducing polyphony). Its chief practitioners are held to be Arvo Pärt (Estonian Orthodox), Henryk Górecki (Polish Catholic), and John Tavener (English in nationality, Greek Orthodox in religion, and not to be confused with John Taverner, a late Renaissance composer); all three have achieved immense commercial success, with Górecki’s
Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (2nd movement, a setting of a prayer scrawled on the walls of a Gestapo prison by a teenage girl) mysteriously, 14 years after its composition, becoming probably the best-selling contemporary classical composition ever, reaching #6 in the UK pop charts (not bad for 55 minutes of slow repetition of chords). [Others held dissenting views – it’s believed that the avant garde composer Pierre Boulez sat next to Górecki for the symphony’s premiere, and loudly shouted “SHIT!” at the end.] Similarly, Tavener’s
The Protecting Veil achieved considerable fame in the 1980s and 1990s, while his more Byzantine-influenced
Song for Athene (a memorial for a young friend killed in an accident) shot to fame as part of the funeral service for Princess Diana. Pärt, the world’s most performed living classical composer, is particularly known for his religious choral works, like
The Deer’s Cry, but his best-known work is probably his early instrumental
Spiegel im Spiegel.
If Minimalism shows some signs of returning at least some way in the direction of the common practice fold, it’s also – and perhaps not coincidentally – perhaps the area of contemporary ‘art’ music that comes closest to contemporary ‘popular’ traditions (‘not coincidentally’ because pop music is generally much more conservative, and conventionally Common Practice, than much 20th century ‘classical music’ became). The “Electronic Dance Music” genre is at least parallel to much Minimalism, and has at times acknowledged a debt to Reich, in particular. Two disciples from La Monte Young’s collective (John Cale and Angus MacLise), in their spare time, helped found an influential rock band named ‘The Velvet Underground’ – songs like
Venus in Furs and
Heroin clearly show the influence of Young’s drone music. Brian Eno, originally a follower of arch-avant-gardist Cornelius Cardew, was converted by Glass, and on a more technical level by Riley’s invention of a tape-delay feedback system (and his practice of playing all the parts in his music himself, playing the tapes simultaneously and taping the result to produce the finished product), and shared his enthusiasm with David Bowie, as seen in the latter’s Berlin albums in particular – a song like
Weeping Wall could almost be an Adams or a Glass. Indeed, Glass reciprocated the interest, writing two symphonies based on Bowie’s work – Bowie’s
Warszawa becoming Glass’
Warszawa, for instance. For full Minimalception, Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ become Glass’ ‘Heroes’ became
this, a work by “Aphex Twin” that superimposes and recombines elements from the Bowie and Glass versions. A little earlier, Terry Riley himself had achieved a degree of cross-over success with
A Rainbow in Curved Air and its synthetic organ; this proved a big influence on bands like The Who, who homaged the composer with both the opening solo and indeed the title of
Baba O’Riley. A few years later, a teenager named Mike Oldfield, using Riley’s tape methods and inspired by A Rainbow in Curved Air, wrote and performed a half-hour classically Minimalist instrumental piece,
Tubular Bells, and managed to make it a massive pop chart success by cunningly not mentioning that it was classical music.
More recently, a band named ‘Muse’ seems to have made a career imitating Glass – compare, for example,
Truman Sleeps and
Japurá River with
“New born”, or
Prophecies with
Take a Bow. Indeed,
this trailer for the film ‘Watchmen’ amusingly lampshades these ‘borrowings’ by juxtaposing Glass and Muse in such a way that you’d have to really know one or the other to spot the seams...
Nor, for that matter, is it only the American minimalists who have approached the popular tradition. Tavener's
Prayer of the Heart, for instance, was written for and performed by Icelandic pop singer Björk Guðmundsdóttir.
Anyway. It may be noticed that those last Glass pieces all derive from film scores, and it’s worth mentioning that throughout the decline in prestige of ‘classical’ music in the 20th century, the film score, with its demands for large-scale composition (to unite the music of a long film), instrumentalism (to avoid lyrics clashing with dialogue) and emotional range (to fit all the circumstances of the film’s plot), was for long a natural refuge for the classical tradition. The first film score was arguably Nathaniel Mann’s set of cues for 1908’s “The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays”, an adaptation of the Oz stories, although this was weird, perhaps better scene as a theatrical performance (it was a touring show starring Baum himself, interleaving hand-illuminated film, magic lantern, and live acting), so the honour should perhaps go instead to revered French composer Camille Saint-Saëns and his score for
The Assassination of the Duke of Guise, four months later. In the first half-century of film scoring, the style was generally a simplified high romantic, sometimes enlivened by musical amplifications of events in the film (e.g. in “King Kong”, in one scene the heavy footsteps of a character creeping forward are magnified by orchestral hits for each footfall). This music tended to be highly melodramatic, with big brass fanfares and soaring (but, thanks to budgest constraints, small!) string sections creating a distinctive period sound. The dominant figures in this music were Erich Korngold, Alfred Newman, Miklós Rózsa, Franz Waxman, and above all Max Steiner, composer of such scores as
King Kong (1933),
Now, Voyager (1942),
Casablanca (1942) (not including the “As Time Goes By” tune, written a decade earlier) and
Gone With the Wind (1939), as well as “The Big Sleep”, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”, “Arsenic and Old Lace”, and about 300 other films. Gone With The Wind features over 90 different musical cues to fill it’s two-and-a-half-hour running time – Steiner didn’t follow the example of Satie, whose score for “Entr’acte” (1924) prefigured aleatoricism by providing a series of short cues that the performers could swap in and out throughout the film as they felt the occasion demanded – a strategy still widely employed in video game scores.
The same sort of music generally continued during and after WWII, but with increasing subtlety and variety, perhaps in part thanks to greater knowledge of Soviet film music from composers like Prokofiev and Shostakovich, who seem at least to me to write with a richer palette. A key figure in this regard was Dmitri Tiomkin, born and trained in the Russian Empire (he studied under Glazunov, the same composer who taught Prokofiev and Shostakovich), before he emigrated to Berlin, then Paris, then the US, where he combined work as a concert pianist (he premiered Gershwin’s Piano Concerto) with work as an accompanist on the vaudeville circuit, before finally ending up in Holywood, breaking his arm, and being forced as a result to concentrate on working as a composer. Tiomkin’s Russian sound (often dramatically reducing or removing the string section, adding in folk ‘colour’ instruments, percussion and choral backing) and formal elements common in Russia such as basing an entire score on a folk-like song yielded such Soviet-tinted works as
High Noon,
Rio Bravo,
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,
The Alamo,
Wild is the Wind,
The Guns of Navarone,
Giant and, from TV, the unashamedly Cossack
Rawhide. Tiomkin’s oeuvre didn’t just expand the scope of film scores and establish a definitive sound for the American West on film – it also altered the economics of film composition fundamentally. High Noon was the first film known to be released solely for the sake of its soundtrack (initial test-viewer response was so poor that the film was not distributed, until the theme tune hit the charts), and Tiomkin’s habit of headlining his films with an ear-catching melody (sometimes instrumental, sometimes vocal) that would later be released as a single changed what studios demanded from a film.
From the late 1950s, film scores became far more diverse, incorporating serialism (as in Rosenman’s
Fantastic Voyage), jazz (as in Ellington’s
Anatomy of a Murder, and, in the case of Shire’s
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, both jazz and elements of serialism at the same time. Over time, however, while composers have become more at liberty to vary their scores to match the particular requirements of the film, there has been a trend away from these experiments back toward a form of conventional tonality, either neo-Romantic (as heard in Williams’
Star Wars: The Force Awakens), or Minimalist (as in Jóhannsson’s
The Theory of Everything. Or, you know, sometimes just someone elses’ work slowed down a lot, as in Zimmer’s
Dunkirk (yes, that’s Elgar’s “Nimrod”, played really, really slowly). In many ways the new trend (slowed-down romantic melodies with ornamentation) pretty much brings us back to where we (nearly) started, with the heterophony of Leonin and Perotin, and the mediaeval cantus firmus tradition.