Weak Melody

There’s a board book our family must have read aloud 1,000 times when our kids were little. The last page was a tune with silly nonsense lyrics.

The only trouble was, I thought the melody had an error, because it didn’t end on the tonic. Instead of do, it ended on sol. Weird, right? For an unaccompanied children’s tune, it’s very weird. So I fixed it, and went right on singing it.

That’s when my wife and I discovered we heard the song differently – because when I sang my fixed version, she was appalled that I was ending on fa, instead of do. She agreed with the melody in the book.

Basically, we each heard alternative harmonizations in two different keys – if she heard it in C, I heard it in F.

It’s been an ongoing joke – we’ll sing it together, end on our preferred notes, and then glare at each other and laugh.

It wasn’t until today that I pointed out that this is the truth: if a melody can justify two completely different harmonizations equally well, it’s probably a weak melody. A strong melody would insist on its key.