Heathering Winds von Dan Dediu, oder die Ausbreitung der Melodie

Abstract

As a musical parameter, melody – conventionally understood as a (consecutive) succession of sounds – is an essential coordinate of Romanian music, which claims stylistically and historically from the parlando-rubato aesthetics of tradition folk music. In Dan Dediu’s piano piece Heathering Winds we discover a new perspective on the composition of melody (an essential parameter in the composition of music), which can also be regarded as a new view, as a different aesthetics, both for first, and the second half of the 20th century, therefore characteristic to our time. The analytical approach presents an overview of the piano piece inspired by Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights, in which key points from the British writer’s novel are presented, followed by an overview of the formal dramaturgy and presentation of the piano piece’s main musical ideas. Finally, our melodic analysis uses the theorising of the composer himself (Dan Dediu, Melodia, 2006) to capture the complexity of melodic structuring, which – breaking the traditional pattern of a melodic line, in which the ratio of durations and pitches is optimal to be perceived as such – expands, tending towards what Dediu calls infra- and supermelody, i.e. a melody that pushes its boundaries, creating, from a single “melodic thread”, the illusion of an innovative musical syntax.