Who'da thunk it? After 20 years of writing serious "art" music, nearly a decade teaching music composition in the halls of such venerable institutions as Harvard and Brandeis, this over-educated music nerd-cum-opera-impresario has a new life soundtrack: Lady Gaga.
I am officially confessing to you all here and now. I can't get enough. And I'm in serious need of an intervention. What do you find so intoxicating, you ask? Musically-speaking, this stuff represents some curious marriage of the essence of Bach and Mozart. Huh? I know. Sounds crazy, but it's true!
Mozart's enduring popularity can be traced in large part to his marriage of melody with harmony. Mozart did not innovate but he took existing forms and perfected them by creating melodies that stuck in the mind's ear and wouldn't get out. How did he do this? Well, a possible over-simplification would be to argue that he created melodies that acheived their emotional climaxes in perfect synch with the harmonies operating underneath. His melodies are so memorable, not simply because of their shape but because of their relationship to the harmonic underpinnings implied by them.
And Bach was the master of polyphony. For non-musicians reading this, polyphony is just a fancy way of drawing our attention to the multiple voices that operate in a given piece of music. Imagine a big orchestral fabric in which the tuba is tugging along on the bottom, performing an interesting bass line that moves in its own direction while the violins soar above, swirling above in endless spirals into the heavens. These are two distinct musical strands that move independently and, yet, in the case of Bach (and much of the music that came after him) the polyphony results in exciting harmonic movement operating on a whole other plane. Usually we experience it unconcsiously as we hear various musical strands dancing in different directions. The pinnacle of this musical exercise was expressed in the fugue, a form Bach nearly perfected. He wrote so many of them! And, oddly, (perhaps not a coincidence?) Gaga uses some fugue-like music to intro the music video of her song, Bad Romance.
Oddly, either I've compleely lost my marbles, or Gaga seems to have a bit of both Mozart and Bach in her blood. Her melodies are infectious -- you can't stop singing them. And her polyphonic fabrics are complex and endlessly engaging. Like a Bach fugue, they never sound quite the same twice.
I'm hooked. Help me someone. Please! Oh, Gaga, you've got me wond'rin' why I like it rough.
