Melodic language is additive. The thematic elements of European music before about 1650 strike a modern ear as sometimes compelling but often bare. Then bit by bit musicians added new moves, new sequences, new chromatic notes, and one by one these passed into the common parlance, like that falling-sixth cadence in “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” or the “blue notes” that Puccini had observed just in time to work one into “Nessun dorma.” It goes somewhat similarly in the life of an individual listener: young children everywhere start with basic diatonic or pentatonic patterns and subsequent experience widens and refines the ear-brain pathway. The more tunes one gets to know, the more receptive one can be to the next, or to the next expansion of the vocabulary. This is why melody is both a fundamental human good and a renewable resource. Across the permutations of text, mood, register, instrumentation, tempo, rhythm, and meter, those few notes and neighbors can be arranged in enough ways to be practically inexhaustible. Each parameter has its limits; the possibilities are not mathematically infinite, but they might as well be.

What is actually much more limited, and limiting, is the avoidance of melody. But that became an important project in the early 20th century, increasingly so during the decades of entrenchment against melody’s new owners in the pop world. Schönberg affected a supreme confidence that his music was unpopular only because music-lovers were unmusical: “if they were musical,” he said apropos Pierrot Lunaire, “they would go away whistling the tunes.” But he must have known he was whistling past the graveyard. The vocal part of Pierrot has carefully notated pitches, which are described by the composer as obligatory in the execution of his Sprechstimme concept. But they are available only to a vocalist able to ideate specified pitches whether or not they make melodic sense to the ear, which means a very well-trained musician, and Pierrot is supposed to be performable by an actress. Only a tiny proportion of its executants have come even reasonably close to delivering the composed notes, and the one who recorded it under Schönberg’s direction (Erika Stiedry-Wagner) was not among them. She declaims the poems with enthusiasm, but her pitches are best described as “whatever.” Is that what the composer meant the audience should whistle?

Pierrot Lunaire is a great piece, but Schönberg had crossed a line. Asymmetry felt against a background of symmetry and dissonance felt against a notion of consonance leave a listener in touch with what seem to be the hard-wired basics of “music.” Discerning those basics may require the sophistication of a practiced ear if the complexities are great, the symmetries disguised more often than revealed, the moments of actual consonance rare. That is presumably why different auditors lose their way at different levels of musical complexity; some of the first to hear Tristan thought in apparent seriousness that parts of it were jumbled together from random notes. More advanced listeners found that they could follow and grasp, and their championship brought the music to a level of exposure that helped those who might need longer to absorb it. One of the most willful critical fallacies is the likening of this decisively-accomplished process to the never-accomplished one of seeking assent for the atonalists of the 20th century. When they systematically eliminated consonance and audible symmetry altogether, we were in new territory. It’s pointless, or worse, to urge people to “keep trying” when what they’re trying to find has been purposely removed.