The Music That Links Dumbledore's Death to Bach and Radiohead

Writing music that captures, for just a moment, that feeling of inexpressible sadness or grief experienced after loss or tragedy, is one of the most challenging tasks a composer can face. And Nicholas Hooper, composer for the fifth and sixth Harry Potter films, had this unenviable task. He had to write a piece of music that holds and distills our emotions after Dumbledore has died. A music of deep darkness, emanating from some cold black well. The emotional core of this music might seem to be the solo cello singing its keening lament, but it's actually something else. It's the bass line, a repeating four-note idea, a simple ostinato, a so-called lament bass. It is no accident that Hooper chose this idea for this moment. The lament bass has an almost 600-year history that weaves a thread between the earliest western music, to the experimental sounds of the Beatles and Radiohead, all the way back to the Half-Blood Prince. So let's uncover the history of this ancient music. We'll begin our story in the 15th century. As polyphonic music was starting to develop, composers began to explore different ways of expressing emotional ideas in their music, and out of these experiments came the concept of word painting, using the music to reflect the meaning and intention of the poetry or liturgy being sung. From the earliest days of western music, it was common for sadness to take the form of descending, usually melismatic vocal lines, with phrases often cascading in a stepwise way, from the highest notes of a singer's range, down to the richest part of their voice. You can hear it in this work, for example, Four Soulements, by 15th century Franco-Flemish composer Johannes Ockeghem. This musical form mirrors the cadence of a sigh or someone collapsing under the weight of their grief, and was really just an extension of the ideas heard in central European folk music of the time, but it quickly became a trope of both liturgical as well as secular music, and so over years of iteration and development, this concept was distilled into what is perhaps one of the simplest bass lines in music. And to hear an example, let's jump forward to 17th century Italy, to 1638. By this point in his life, Venetian composer Claudio Monteverdi had written monumental operas and large-scale liturgical works, but in the final years of his life, he writes one of his most simple pieces of music, Lamento della Ninfa, for solo soprano and male trio. And in it, Monteverdi uses a four-note descending bass line. It moves stepwise from the tonic to the dominant via the natural minor scale, and then back up again. The snarone instantly establishes the tone of the music, but it also gives the music an astonishing freedom. The bass line repeats over and over, and so the singers are left to wander freely and expressively above this repeating form. Sometimes their notes align with the and harmony of the bass line, sometimes they clash against it. But what results, what we hear, is a constant cycle of tension and release, of predictability mixed with chaos, of life mixed with death. But like with any musical trope, the real power comes not from replicating the form, but from subverting it. 21 years after Lamento della Ninfa was written, Barbara Strozzi composed her Lagrimae Mei for soprano and continuo. In it, she also uses the lament bass like Monteverdi, but unlike Monteverdi, the most arresting part of her piece comes when she moves away from the repeating ostinato. The music breathes here, lightens, and for a moment, tries to escape the strictures of its own form. But this is only the beginning of the evolution of this idea. When we get to the end of the 17th century, the lament bass has taken on an even darker guise. In Dido's Lament from Purcell's 1689 opera, following the cursed love of Dido and Aeneas, the bass line has become entirely chromatic. It still descends in a stepwise manner, but it's now moving in half steps, creating even more tension, harshness, and anguish. And so, by the end of the 17th century, the lament bass, either in its chromatic or diatonic form, had been firmly established as a central feature of western music. In the first half of the 1700s, Bach produced his monumental Mass in B minor. And at the moment that the chorus sings of Christ's death, we hear a pulsing version of the chromatic bass line underneath sinuous, twisting voices. Then in 1778, Mozart wrote his Violin Sonata in E minor, after his mother had died, and the second movement opens with an idea constructed around the lament bass. And then in 1839, as the Romantic era of music was beginning to flourish, Mendelssohn composed his Roy Blass Overture, based on Victor Hugo's dark and sinister play of the same name. The overture opens with a grand version of the Andalusian Cadence. A chord sequence built around the lament bass line. But despite its popularity and widespread use, over time the lament bass would start to disappear from western music, falling out of fashion as, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, the structures and forms that had propped up concert and liturgical music for the past 500 years were beginning to be dismantled. And so, the lament bass needed to find a new home. And it found its home in blues. Born out of the spirituals of African American slaves in the deep south, the sound of the descending, lamenting bass line aligned with the dark history of black oppression in America. And we can hear examples of the chromatic bass line in many early recordings of blues songs. From Mammy Smith's Crazy Blues from 1920, to Willie Brown's Future Blues, to Robert Johnson's Walking Blues from 1937. Eventually, the bass line of these and similar songs would make their way into popular music, in songs like Hit The Road Jack and Feeling Good. But the idea never lost touch with its dark historical roots. The Beatles employed the lament bass prolifically, but its most profound use is in While My Guitar Gently Weeps from the White Album. This is a sort of contemporary version of a Dowland lament, or a Monteverdi madrigal, a modern reimagining of this ancient music. And if it was good enough for the Beatles, it was certainly good enough for Elton John in Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word, for Muse in Butterflies and Hurricanes, and for Radiohead's Complex Soundworld. Paranoid Android, one of Radiohead's most adventurous experiments in form, features a C minor refrain in the second half, with a chromatic lament bass. There really are too many examples to mention. The lament bass, after hundreds of years of development and reframing and evolution and revolution, found its way into almost every form of music, from renaissance music, to baroque, to classical, to romantic, to blues and jazz, to rock, and of course, to film music. And this leads us back to where we began. Nicholas Hooper is doing the same thing here, as Monteverdi and Strozzi did 400 years ago, using a simple bass line to create and maintain an emotional world in which the music and story can live. On top of the bass line, the cycle of suspensions in the strings and choir sound like some distant chanting chorus, with the solo cello leading this mass for the dead. A single voice, bursting through the darkness. The reason why this music is so effective, and so affecting, is in part because of its history. Hooper is calling back to the songs of grief and loss from centuries past, and giving us and the characters, and all those who have experienced death in their lives, a world to contain our sadness. But you can also hear this music without knowing the context or story, and you can still feel like it's right, like it's true. And this is the astonishing power of this idea. Music isn't a universal language, but sometimes it speaks so clearly, that it's difficult to imagine anything else would work, that anything else would make us feel as comforted, or held, in this moment. Thank you so much for watching. I'm so pleased that this video has been sponsored by Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes for learning new skills, that can help you make this year a year of learning, growth, and connection through creativity. There are so many class topics for you to explore, and I've recently been delving into the world of productivity. 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