The most impressive thing about Ward’s descriptive technique is its strategy. In order to paint
“joining” with a sudden homorhythm, he precedes it with a passage of hocketing text repetition. In order
to paint “the foot” with a bass entrance, he withholds the voice from the whole preceding line. The
strategy, of course, is based on a particularly fine awareness that relationships are what impart musical
meaning, and that the simplest sort of relationship to contrive is an antithesis. Pictorialisms that seem
more “direct” or “essential” are in fact the opposite, resting on specifically musical conventions that must
be learned before their effects can be perceived. Thus Ward’s brook “murmurs” by way of a melisma
whose down-and-up contour may seem self-evidently (like Monteverdi’s) to describes a wave. But that is
because we have all internalized a spatial (up/down) analogy that is by no means given in the sounds
themselves. Even more convention-bound is Ward’s depiction of “stealing softly”: it is ingeniously
matched to a suspension, the lowest voice stealing softly to a dissonance beneath the higher ones. But to
get this particular joke one needs concepts that come only with technical musical training.
EX. 17-25 John Ward, Upon a Bank, mm. 12–27