Ethan Hein remixes "Dreams" across a dozen other works to illustrate harmonic/melodic divorce in popular song, and I can't resist making a response song about Charles Rose would likely say the rumblings of that divorce go as far back as Hector Berlioz and the divorce papers sure got signed by the time of Phil Collins era divorce-ballads

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2024/the-melodic-harmonic-divorce-in-pop/

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2025/what-key-is-dreams-by-fleetwood-mac-actually-in/

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2026/what-i-learned-from-remixing-dreams-over-and-over/

https://ethanhein.substack.com/p/twelve-remixes-of-dreams-by-fleetwood

 

Dropping the vocal stem of Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" on to the instrumental tracks of "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees sounds good.  It does also sound very funny.

 

Dropping the vocal line over Bach's legendary Prelude in C major from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier also worked quite well.  All the remixes are worth hearing not just for their novelty but as a way to underline Ethan Hein's blogging thread about the emergence of harmonic/melodic divorce in popular music.  Now if Charles Rosen were still alive he might have been tempted to clear his throat and say that the first rumblings of harmonic/melodic divorce were beginning to happen with the music of Hector Berlioz centuries ago.  Yeah, yeah, if you actually like the music of Berlioz and I kind of don't but point taken. And now I will digress, as I so often do.

Now I do have a thought about what is actually very important in Hein's remixes and what they have to do with music.  The most significant power in creating musical connections and developing musical possibilities is memory.  The intrinsic relationship between working memory and musical perception and interpretation goes at least as far back as Augustine of Hippo (whose De Musica is available in English translation at archive.org now). I have been very critical of Ted Gioia for his use and misuse of Augustine's complex and mercurial thoughts about music for some time now. Part of the complexity of Augustine's thoughts on music come from the simple fact that he wrote Books I-V of De Musica before his conversion to Christianity while Book VI was written after he had become a Christian. The good news for non-Christians who blanche at the prospect of reading one of the most famous Christian thinkers in history is that Books I-V don't discuss Christian doctrine at all for previously stated reasons. The bad news is that De Musica is regarded as one of the most punishingly tedious treatises on anything from antiquity.  Augustine himself realized it was so painfully dull that he opened Book VI with an apology for how genuinely boring everything he wrote in Books I-V actually was!

Modulating well is what the science of music was for Augustine and by "modulating" was not meant "changing keys".  Since everything in the treatise was about poetic rhythm in Latin poetics "modulation" is best thought of in rhythmic terms.  To put this in terms that may be clearer to hiphop than other styles of music, you could say that Books I-V were where Augustine established the scientific principles of establishing a flow.  Those concepts are by and large unfamiliar to me but I have friends who are into hiphop and rap and have explained the basic idea in theory and practice.  Part of my aversion to Gioia's handling of Augustine is how the Christian saint becomes symptomatic of the Greek of Greeks when he needs to be the emblem of "Pythagorean" music and thus a bad guy, but when Gioia wanted to question whether there was even such a thing as "Western" harmony he abruptly remembered Augustine was one of the great Christian bishops of Africa.  Right ... that's why I can't take Ted Gioia seriously when he so obviously moves goalposts. Augustine's thought is complex and remains controversial and it's more fair to him historically to not try to simplify him down to one or another side of a glib Substackified dualisms.

So, the thing about memory and music is that juxtaposition and rhythm are significant.  Hein's experiments show that it is possible to reconceive melodic materials in shifting harmonic and rhythmic contexts.  This is only possible if he you have refined your powers of associative memory to the point where you can drop a Stevie Nicks vocal over the instrumental tracks of a song by the Bee Gees.  Leveraging associative memory for musically expressive purposes is what Johann Sebastian Bach did when he created a fugal first movement for the Credo of his Mass in B minor by using the incipit of the ancient plainchant as the subject of his fugue. Once we consider that the fugal subject is the incipit of the Credo then this could be considered one of the more epic sample flips in "classical music", to go back to a post Ethan Hein did called "fugue as sample flip". Ethan Hein and I have gone back and forth about fugue as sample flip in the past and I feel like a chump for not thinking of the Credo from Mass in B minor as a sample flip earlier. 

 

The paradox of Stevie Nicks' vocal fitting so readily over a Johann Sebastian Bach prelude is that 18th century music tends to be so contrapuntal the prospect of such a juxtaposing working is surprising.  The juxtaposition totally works but that is what a "textbook" approach to classical music cultivated since the long 19th century would tell you isn't supposed to happen and shame on you for thinking it!  But those kinds of juxtapositions, as we have just heard and seen via Bach's Mass in B minor, were what happened in actual 18th century practice. But there is a sense in which the Mac/Bach mash-up comes off as a surprise because harmony and melody in Western theory and practice was very married and, if we just run with Bach's life and times as a jokey analogy, had twenty kids where the family resemblances were not hard to see.  As a friend of mine in college once joked, fifteen generations of Bachs had a penchant for sounding similar. 

Temporal disjunction as a basis for musical exploration has been going on for a long time.  In the 20th century we could look at something like George Rochberg's Caprice Variations for solo violin on a theme by Pagannini. The 1970s was an interesting era in both classical music and rock/pop because of the different kinds of experiments in musical code-switching that were going on.  I had a somewhat short (for me) reflection how George Rochberg's landmark string quartets from the 1970s were composed around the same time Stevie Wonder wrote "Living for the City" and both American composers can be heard and interpreted as experimenting with code switching, how to shift pitch vocabularies mid-work.  I think overall Wonder's song has had more staying power but my point is that we've been living in an era in which, as Leonard Meyer put it, not everyone is going to like the same music but democracy should ensure everyone is free to like whatever they like. 

So it can be useful to study popular song where the divorce between harmony and melody has been firmly established since Kramer vs. Kramer.  Back in the days of Berlioz, to keep running with the gag, harmony and melody were a little out of sync and maybe spent a lot of time in separate rooms of the same house,  but neither was actually consulting with divorce attorneys yet and the divorce papers were definitely not finalized.   By the time Phil Collins showed up with his 1980s era divorce-pop harmony and melody were most assuredly living “Separate Lives”. Some forty years on I think we could say that Phil Collins (love him or hate him or whatever) became one of the maestros of the divorce pop song. 

You might find the humor groan-worthy but I don't care any more.  You listening?  I don't care any more!