Phenomena of Music, part 1: Function
In the world of music that we hear every day—whether it’s by Katy Perry or Beethoven or Béla Fleck or McCoy Tyner—there are common threads. At times, the differences might seem too overwhelming to recognize any commonality; after all, it’s hard to confuse electro swing and classic rock, for instance. Nevertheless, a fundamental musical language permeates, and one might argue that it all boils down to one baseline concept: function.
Function is a nebulous word, not just inherently but also in its application in music. People often talk about how a harmony, for example, functions. A dominant 7th chord has an easily-perceived function: it normally requires, or at least “begs for,” a certain kind of resolution. If you are less familiar with this idea, stay tuned for two examples of the V–I chord progression below.
But there is function outside of triads; seventh chords, dyads, scales, perhaps even random collections of notes, or maybe even a single note, could be thought of as having function. Specifically, we might hear one of these things and then, without hearing anything else, perceive a phantom sound in our mind’s ear that we wish would come next. We might not know exactly what that ghostly sound-impression represents, or why we hear it—but something about what we are actually hearing is prompting an instinctive desire to hear something next. No, phantom sound is unfortunately not a technical term, but it certainly should be.
The defining moment
One of the most immortalized and powerful examples of function in music history occurs in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, in the moment where the third movement dives directly into the opening of the fourth. Here is the moment, starting at the deceptive cadence of movement 3. As you listen, notice the feeling of optimism and energy that begins to activate at about 24:49, and then blossoms at 25:00. The functional moment of “victory” is hard to miss—it’s the biggest arrival point in music history, I might editorialize—but in case you want confirmation, it’s 25:06.
The function of this moment manifests in three ways, and in fact, these three ways serve as great examples of how function in general can present itself.
Harmonic progression
First, the harmonic progression, which in this case is the quintessential functional pair of harmonies: V–I. I promised a brief explanation of this earlier, and here it is. You can think of Happy Birthday: imagine the last line of the song, “Happy birthday dear [name], happy birthday to you.” Those last two words are accompanied by the basic V–I progression: “to” is accompanied by the dominant chord, V, while “you” is accompanied by the tonic chord, I. A thought experiment: imagine the music just stopped on “to.” …can’t happen, right? We await the resolution to I, which comes on the wings of the final word, “you,” with a sense of inevitability and even entitlement. That’s the function of hearing a V chord: it must resolve to our beloved I chord. (For more on harmonic functions, I highly recommend you check out either this beginner’s introduction and then this methodical, more advanced explanation.)
The exact same thing happens here, in Beethoven’s Fifth: imagine how terrible it would be to put a gap right before the moment of victory, or worse, to deny it altogether! That itself is illustrative of the very idea of function: something has to happen, something that we are perceiving as a “phantom sound” in our mind’s ear right before it even happens. This huge dominant swell must resolve via a grand tonic arrival, and a break in the sound would be unmusical and unthinkable. You don’t need to know the terms to hear the phantom resolution and feel the music’s euphoric approach to it.
Orchestration
Second, the specific orchestration that Beethoven uses for the two harmonies, dominant and tonic, is such that the tension of the dominant is maximized and the satisfaction of its tonic resolution is emphasized. To investigate this, we must turn to the score. See below for a clipping of this transition, corresponding to the range 24:38–24:53 in this recording. The left panel is the end of the third movement, and the right panel is the opening of the fourth; their junction is the moment of functional manifestation, and the transition is performed without gap, as you can hear in the recording and as I mentioned in the V–I discussion above.
Beethoven's Fifth: transition from the end of movement three into movement four
How does the orchestration enable the sense of function, you might ask? Well, more likely you already have your own ideas from listening and from looking at the score. What you see on the left is a huge crescendo over eight bars from p to ff, intensifying the sound through volume; and, on the right, you will notice that there are five new musicians playing for the fourth movement: three trombones, one piccolo, and one contrabassoon. These instruments did not play a note in the entire first three movements, and, in case you didn’t know—they are strange instruments to appear in a symphonic work from the very-early 1800s. Many have likened Beethoven’s unique orchestrational choice here to “calling in the troops” ahead of the final, and this time properly-reinforced, battle for C Major (see below.) What better way to convey the harmonic resolution than with such bold instrumentation.
Context: larger trajectory
And, speaking of which, a third aspect of the function of the moment is encoded in the piece’s mammoth, three-movement long-term trajectory that contextualizes the moment. Out of context, as I have linked in the video, the moment does not illustrate this important third function. Only with the work’s prior tribulations and failures in movements one through three in mind can you appreciate the full function of this moment. In short: Beethoven’s Fifth is an epic saga with a mammoth struggle—unparalleled in intensity in its time, and perhaps still today—for the conversion of C minor, the first movement’s fateful key, to C Major. This very moment marks the unleashing of unbridled hope and optimism—perhaps even a victory—in this mission. For more on Beethoven’s Fifth, and to read more about the larger context that drives this phenomenon, look out for my upcoming essay on the piece that I plan to write… one of these days.
• • •
You may be thinking something along the lines of what many often say: “function,” as a word and a concept, seems to be such a broad catch-all that it obviously connects all genres of music. Thus, it is not interesting, you might fear, to point out that it is, in some sense, universal. But there’s one motivating caveat: not all of music can be explained by function. The notions I’ve outlined in this essay are limited in application. In my next article in this series, I will discuss the ways in which function can actually break down. Indeed, thinking of function alone is too limited a perspective to approach much of the music we hear and listen to—and our ears will often surprisingly gravitate instead to the non-functional.