
(My intimate knowledge of Peppa Pig, of which I am an absolute devotee, stems from my
daughter’s early childhood when she would watch it continuously. She has moved on to pastures less wholesome
now, but I remain an avid viewer, although I admit to finding Ben and Holly more intellectually
stimulating.)
In that episode, the teacher of Peppa’s class, Mrs
Gazelle, leaves the classroom for a moment.
During her absence, petty jealousies erupt and she returns to the find
the class in uproar. “Children,
Children!”, she calls out, clapping her hands to restore order. “You are supposed to be acting like the
countries of the world. Do you see them arguing
and fighting with each other?” (Sad to report, that delicious irony was not
lost on my five-year-old daughter.)
In a bid to restore calm, Mrs Gazelle gets the
children to hold hands and sing “Peace and Harmony to all the World”. Of course, there is nothing remotely peaceful
in the way they sing, bellowing it out for all their worth. Neither is there anything harmonious about it
– delivered in that sour unison which, when delivered by children makes us say “Ah!
Cute!”, but when adults do it we accuse them of being tone deaf. Irony is heavy in Peppa Pig and I have no doubt the script-writers knew exactly what
they were doing here. But with the words "Peace" and "Harmony" increasingly bandied about in the public arena, it might be worth
asking just what do we all mean by them.
“Peace” has become almost an oxymoron in its usage
today. Those who campaign for peace do
so extremely noisily, peace protests often erupt into noisy violence, and “peaceful
demonstrators” reinforce their points by means of megaphones and microphones. From all the first-hand recollections of
warfare I’ve ever come across, peace – as in quietness or silence – is usually seen
as more terrifying than the actual noise of battle. My mother used to recount how, in London
during the Second World War, the thing they dreaded most about the V2 bombs
sent over by the Germans was not the noise they made but the peace which
followed; “You knew you were safe when you could hear them”, she told us
children, “But when it all went silent you were terrified – you knew it was
about to drop down to earth and explode, but you had no idea where”. On top of that, peace is something we
musicians generally try not to deal in, so let’s leave that to one side; it is,
after all, an unattainable state, whether we like it or not.
“Harmony”, however, is perceived to be a musical term
and, as such, discussion of its changing meaning falls easily into the remit of
this blog. The word “harmony” has gone
the way of crescendo in being so
totally misused that its true meaning is lost.
Of course, words are always changing their meaning; that’s the
inevitability of a living language. When
someone tells you about their ass, you assume they are referring to a fleshy
part of their anatomy, not to one of their equine possessions. When someone tells you they are gay, you
immediately assume they have a sexual preference for members of their own sex
with all the emotional complexes that seem to come with that, not that they are
carefree, happy and devoid of psychological hang-ups. So I have no fundamental objection to most
people assuming that a crescendo is
always loud or that harmony is always soothing. But those of us who deal with
history, and in particular musical history, need to know precisely what words
meant to the people using them in the past so that we can properly understand
their usage then; not simply project our understanding of
terminology on to previous eras where their perceptions were substantially
different from ours. Musical terms have
undergone many subtle and not-so-subtle changes of nuance and meaning over the
centuries, and it is the job of music historians to keep track of these and,
where necessary, re-interpret them for the benefit of modern-day musicians.
The true, musical meaning of “harmony” is
straightforward enough. It means a number
of different pitches existing as a block, sounding together or written as a
single vertical entity. (Grove tells gives us rather more detail;
“The combining of notes simultaneously to produce chords and the placing of
chords in succession, whether or not to produce tonally functional
progressions; the word is used also of the system of structural principles
governing chords and progressions”.) We
have, in the past, qualified harmony by describing it as consonance or
dissonance – although those words have also altered considerably in meaning over
the centuries and most would be very ill-advised to use them freely today. Perhaps the word harmony owes its origins to
the very beginnings of music, when ancient Greek and Chinese philosophers, astronomers
and mathematicians (amazingly enough, almost exactly at the same time)
identified it as a continual parallel movement.
Consequently, it would be perfectly correct to suggest that a number of terrorist cells in Spain, working in parallel to reap death and destruction are, in fact, working in "harmony". Is that really what we want to imply when we call for "Harmony" in the world?
Consequently, it would be perfectly correct to suggest that a number of terrorist cells in Spain, working in parallel to reap death and destruction are, in fact, working in "harmony". Is that really what we want to imply when we call for "Harmony" in the world?
In the last half century, harmony has become, for
musicians, a word more indicative of earlier times (ie the music of the 18th
and 19th centuries) than relevant to the music of our day, and
to describe the harmonic language of a living composer often seems to imply
they lack originality and, damningly, have an antiquated approach to
composition. I have no problem with
that, and actually find that to use the word harmony with so much recent music
is almost to apply a negative qualitative judgement on it. Increasingly, we reserve the use of the word
to music which fulfils certain rules laid down in the late 19th
century by academics with minimal practical experience of their own in the act
of composition; something indicated in the second part of the Grove definition.
So by calling for Peace and Harmony, might we not be calling for the terror of silent weaponry unleashed on us in a coordinated attack which adopts the rules of the past and ignores the ethics of contemporary society? This, surely, was not in the minds of Mrs Gazelle nor the children in Peppa Pig’s class. Nor is it in the minds of those who call for “Peace and Harmony” in our world today. But we should be careful what we call for. Do we really want “Harmony” in either its original meaning – an inevitable and unstoppable parallel movement of celestial bodies – or its current meaning – an antiquated and irrelevant observation of sterile rules laid down two centuries ago? For me, I would like a world with no war, strife, argument or mass destruction; but that is such an impossible dream I may as well call for “Peace and Harmony” – that, too, is at root, a totally unrealistic demand.
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