It’s all about the bass

Here are a couple of quotations about basslines and their fundamental importance in musical culture. The bass part is ‘the groundwork upon which all musical composition is to be erected,’ wrote the theorist Christopher Simpson in 1667. A bit later, a member of a reasonably famous pop combo had something di erent to say: ‘None of us wanted to be the bass player. In our minds he was the fat guy who always played at the back’. Well, Paul, that ended up being you, in The Beatles. Not the ‘fat’ bit, and not even the standing ‘at the back’ bit, but the bass-playing part, at least.

But those bass-ic foundations of our music – all of our music, whether it’s the drones of Indian classical music, the deep bells and gongs of the gamelan, the drums and pulses of pop musics all over the world – reflect something fundamental in what bass does to us as human beings. The trouser-flapping power of those massive bass bins in your local club, or the awesome abyss of vibration that the double-basses of the symphony orchestra can unleash are the result of the special things that only sounds down there in the lowest regions can make us feel. Bass frequencies make something obvious that’s true of all musical sounds, which is that they’re made of physical waves through the air. The bass regions thump into your chest, they make your speakers bounce out of their housing, and they can even influence our emotions by their simple physical power. Infrasound – frequencies below 20Hz, the limit of our hearing, sound waves that exist for us as uncanny feeling rather than auditory sensation – are vibrations that can be used to discombobulate our brains and bodies: horror films take advantage of the scientifically measurable e ects of these sound waves, as a 2003 study found, to cause ‘anxiety, uneasiness, sorrow, nervous feelings of revulsion or fear, and chills down the spine’.

The physicality of basslines makes us feel music as an elemental force – it’s what defines the sound of entire genres: reggae, dub, drum and bass. In classical music, one way to tell the story of the development of the art form is a progressive entrenchment and emancipation of the bassline. So here goes, music history in a single sentence: a er the tenor-centred universe of earlier polyphony, bass lines become the foundations of harmony in the Baroque, they achieve a fleeting independence in Bach’s counterpoint but are cemented down in the classical period, before becoming more mobile, exploratory, and eruptive as the foundations of tonal harmony are expanded and liquefied in the 19th and 20th centuries, and are then reclaimed in new contexts by the drones and pedals of many 21st century musics – when they don’t disappear entirely, that is, as in music by Boulez, or, for that matter, the Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em theme. Basslines encompass the whole world of music…

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