It occurred to me today that we often define things by defining them as ‘not other things’.

My wife and I have been arguing about melody and harmony for decades. She’s a soprano, and if you’re a choral singer, you know that means that she is accustomed to getting to sing the melody in most music arranged for SATB choirs. I’m a tenor, which means that, in SATB choral arrangements, I usually sing harmony with the altos and the basses.

The funny thing about this is that, in TTBB choral arrangements (these arrangements are for choirs with two tenor parts and a baritone and a bass part), tenors usually get to sing the melody. As a tenor, I can say that I understand what it’s like to get to sing the melody and also what it’s like to get to sing the harmony.

But, what most musicians understand is that the melody and the harmony are not necessarily better or worse than each other. From a technical standpoint, there isn’t anything about the melody that makes it more enjoyable to sing. In fact, many people who are accustomed to singing the harmony lines in music will come to prefer it, since it is often in the process of harmonizing with a melodic line that musicians will discover that music becomes even more beautiful than it was before.

Which brings me to my point for this opening section –> harmony is defined by melody and melody is defined by harmony. You can’t have a harmonic line without having a melody for the harmony to coexist alongside. A melody isn’t a melody if there aren’t harmonies going on.

The two of them lose their full meaning in the absence of the other.

* * *

Whenever my kids complain about how hot it is, or how cold it is, I usually make some reference to the relativistic nature of their claims –i.e. “If you think this is hot, you should live on the surface of the moon!” or “If you think this is cold, you should live on Neptune!”– and this rarely does anything but annoy them. It should does get the eye rolls, though!

But, when you come to think about it, a lot of things are like this.

When Guns ‘N Roses released the song, November Rain, in 1992, the length of the radio edit of the song was almost five minutes. Considering that your average pop song tends to be just over three minutes, that makes the song seem pretty long. However, the album edit of the song was almost nine minutes long. If that seems like too much, let me ask you this, “How would you feel about a song that was twenty-seven seconds long?”

The tallest people in the world have to duck to get through doorways, but the shortest people in the world have to use footstools to reach sinks. If we made all sinks so short that everyone could reach them
–even the shortest among us– then they would inconvenience the person of average stature, and they would absolutely confound the tallest people around.

In the darkest room, a single candle offers quite a glow, but that same candle in the middle of the afternoon on a summer’s day is of no additional consequence when it comes to lighting an open field.

If I say “up north” in Alabama, I might be referring to Tennessee, but “up north” in Michigan means the Upper Peninsula. It’s not likely that anyone in Alabama has ever said “up north” in reference to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

When it comes to many of these concepts, they are hard to fully comprehend without the understanding of their opposite.

What would ‘pretty’ look like if everyone was pretty? Who knows?

How would we understand ‘evil’ if no one ever did anything wrong? What if everyone did only bad things? Would that make all of us ‘evil’, or would it just then be what we considered normal?

* * *

My wife bought a new board game for the family to play the other night. The game involved trying to get people to guess a noun by using adjectives of different types, displayed on a board. You could choose to use any of about sixty different adjectives, and you could place these adjective tiles on the display board in sections that say, “Definitely”, “Kind Of”, and “Not”.

So, if I am trying to get people to guess “Grand Canyon”, I could put the adjective “SMALL” in the “Not” part of the display board, or I could put the adjective “HUGE” in the “Definitely” part of the display board. The rounds are timed, and you want to get your audience to guess as many nouns as possible.

What we noticed right away was that we tended to like to use the “Definitely” part of the board, even if it meant that we needed to search through the list of adjectives for longer to find what we were looking for. This is obviously a bad strategy, since it uses up the time element in the round. But, the inefficiency of it didn’t keep people from doing it.

Knowing that “SMALL” is available to use is great if I’m trying to get people to guess “lice”, but what if I’m trying to get people to guess “Mars”. Will I search for too long to find “MASSIVE” or will I just grab the “SMALL” and put it in the “Not” part of the display board?

Interestingly enough, we had a lot of fun playing the game, because it was challenging for us to try to discover ways to get people to guess the right answers.

* * *

I wrote in the opening section about melody and harmony, together, being more beautiful than they would be separately, and certainly more beautiful than the melody would be alone.

As I was writing that line, the following thought occurred to me.

We each have our own song to sing, in this life. We exist, during the singing of our songs, alongside other ‘song-singers’ whose songs occur next to ours. We can harmonize with them, as we allow for their songs to become the melody, and we can –selfishly– insist on our songs being the melody with which others around us are then forced to harmonize.

If it truly doesn’t matter what we’re singing (trust me, harmonies are as beautiful as melodies), then it seems like the right choice to put other people, and their ‘melodies’, in the spotlight.

To honor those around us, we should enjoy the opportunity that we have to harmonize with their melodies.