common than tone 1 in the melody (13 vs 4 occurrences), yet tone 2 never serves as a rest-
ing point: instead, it almost always leads back to tone 1. Furthermore, it is never long in
duration, and frequently occurs off the beat. Thus scale degrees 1 and 2, though neighbours
in frequency, play very different structural roles in the melody.
Bigand’s ‘tonal weight’is simply the degree of structural stability or centrality of each
tone in a key, as quantified in perception experiments by Krumhansl.^25 Krumhansl has
demonstrated an empirical hierarchy of stability for the notes in a particular key, with scale
degree 1 being the most stable, followed by scale degrees 5 and 3 (G and E in the key of C)
while degrees 2, 4, 6, and 7 have lower stability (D, F, A, & B in the key of C).Ornamentation
The concept that some pitches serve to elaborate or ornament others is central to Western
European music theory (e.g. the theories of Schenker,^26 Meyer,^4 and Lerdahl & Jackendoff;^8
cf. Cook^27 ), and is also found in the music theory of many non-Western cultures, includ-
ing China and India. For example, in one Chinese folk tradition musicians speak of orna-
menting a melodic skeleton in terms of‘adding flowers’to a melody.^28 The ability to
distinguish structural from ornamental pitches is thought to play an important role in
melody perception, for example, in a listener’s ability to recognize one passage as an elabor-
ated version of another.^8 An important issue for the study of melodic ornamentation is
understanding the basis upon which pitches are perceived as structural vs ornamental. One
relevant study in this regard is that of Bharucha,^29 who used a memory experiment to show
that the salience of a tonally unstable note was influenced by its serial position relative to the
following note. Specifically, Bharucha demonstrated that an unstable note which is imme-
diately followed by a tonally stable pitch neighbour (e.g. B–C in a C major context) is less
prominent/detectable than an unstable note which is not ‘anchored’in this way. It is as if the
stable tone subordinates the preceding tone as a local ornament and makes it less conspicu-
ous than if the same preceding tone were inserted randomly into the sequence. This suggests
that the tonal hierarchy is involved in perceived elaboration relations in music.Implicit harmony
While melodies present tones one at a time (i.e.‘horizontally’), chords present tones in
combination (i.e.‘vertically’). The organization of chords in musical sequences is the
domain of harmony. As with the tones of a melody, different chords play distinct structural
roles in the fabric of the music, reflecting some of the same relationships which applied to
the roles of individual tones. For example, different chords are associated with different
degrees of stability, with one chord acting as a point of greatest structural stability: the tri-
adic chord built on the first degree of the scale. This ‘tonic chord’, together with the chords
built on the fourth and fifth scale degrees (the ‘subdominant’and ‘dominant’chords,330 Figure 21.4 Scale degree of each tone in K0016. 1do, 2re, 3mi, etc. ( 5 so in the octave below).
3 22 2 1– 5 – 5 3 3 212 33355 543 222 243211223 2