From Wikipedia on Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik:

The first movement is in sonata-allegro form. It opens with an ascending Mannheim rocket theme

Stop here. What’s an “ascending Mannheim rocket theme”? Clicking the blue Mannheim rocket text leads to the page on the Mannheim school, which explains that a “Mannheim rocket” is a “swiftly ascending passage typically having a rising arpeggiated melodic line together with a crescendo,” e.g., that thing that the opening figure in Eine kleine Nachtmusik is.

This struck me. This sort of thing has a name! I like it when things that I never knew had names have names. And “Mannheim Rocket,” as far as names of things go, is a pretty awesome name. The Wikipedia article goes on to explicate a trove of hitherto-unknown-to-me musical terminology: the Mannheim Crescendo, the Mannheim Roller, the Mannheim Sigh, the Mannheim Birds, the Mannheim Climax, the Grand Pause. All things that, apparently, the court orchestra of Mannheim pioneered in the 1700s. Well done, Mannheim court orchestra!

Why am I so awed by the nameyness of this thing? My impression of respectable classical music theory is that it’s not very concerned about specific melodic phrases, preferring to discourse in grander ideas like transformations and inversions and progressions and harmony and form. And that’s just from when I took AP Music Theory in high school; my impression is that when you enter music colleges and more rarefied spaces of professorial thought, the things you discuss now bear portentous names like Neo-Riemannian theory and Schenkerian analysis. This is sort of like how early biology was like “I found this strange lizard on my travels in Sumatra” but modern biology is like “statistical algorithms to infer population structure” so if you want to be taken seriously in a 21st century biology lab you have to be more like “we performed X analysis on these gene sequences and identified Y genes to be statistically significant after Bonferroni correction” and less like “hey, look at this weird bird!”

But I like the weird birds! Abstraction may get you tenure, but me, it’s easier to think about weird birds and “dum, da-dum, da-dat-dat-dat-dat-dum!” than EM algorithms and Schenkerian analysis.

Names make things easier to think about, easier to study. We have names for complicated abstract things because we need to in order to be able to study them at all. But I wonder what it means that I knew what the heck is the Riemannian Tonnetz years before I learned that there’s a name for “dum, da-dum, da-dat-dat-dat-dat-dum!”

(Okay, true, the weird birds do have names, they even have scientific Latin ones, but the point is this is something I never studied in school, maybe my teachers or the state curriculum decided that was less important than what mitochondria are the powerhouse of.)

I wonder what other melodic phrases have names. I can think of a lot of phrases across jazz and rock and pop that could have names. The only named one I can think of right now is the seven-note jazz licc.