ABSTRACT
What is the function of ‘news signature tunes’? To call the listener to attention? To serve as a musical label, a kind of aural logo? No doubt news signature tunes do both these things, but they also do something else. The music which was ideologically dominant before that time, the music of the Church, shunned the Ionian mode although that mode was widely used in secular music. In polyrhythmic music, for example, each voice or instrument has its own time, yet all fit together. In modern ‘Afro-American’ popular music the beat is often displaced, anticipated or delayed. The contrast between ‘public’ and ‘private’ is, in the Western tradition, also realised by the system of durational patterning of melodies. Public music frequently uses dotting, in which a note is repeated in such a way that the repeated note is long and the repeating one short.
