Editor’s note: Besides tracking technological advancements and innovations, our author is a Juilliard-trained musical composer. He has created a musical piece titled “Harmonic Melodies” for you to enjoy while reading this column.
Most of us have been taught to think of music in terms of melody. A melody is memorable. It’s singable. It’s the part of the song you hum when the music stops. But while a melody can charm and linger, it’s fragile. Remove its support, and it can vanish into thin air. By contrast, a harmonic progression is enduring. It is the architecture underneath, the community of tones moving together. If a melody is a single story, a harmonic progression is a chorus of voices woven into a larger continuity.
This distinction, while musical at its root, also reveals something profound about how structure works throughout human endeavors. And here in the Berkshires, a place where music, art, and ideas continuously interlock, the metaphor carries even more weight.
Beyond the singable line
People often assume that music requires a melody. That’s what we’re taught. Melody is what you whistle, what you hum in the shower, what gets stuck in your head. But music doesn’t necessarily need a melody. Across cultures, traditions flourish where melody barely shows up: taiko drumming in Japan, West African percussion ensembles, ambient soundscapes, electronic textures, and even jazz improvisation. These don’t depend on a tune. They depend on rhythm, atmosphere, or harmony. What matters is not a singable line but a structure that makes us feel something.
That’s where harmonic progressions come in. A progression isn’t one story; it’s a landscape of possibilities. It implies hundreds of melodies, all at once. In a jazz session, you can play the head once and never touch it again; the changes carry everything. They give you a framework where new lines can be discovered in every chorus. A melody is a script. A progression is a playground. One dictates a story. The other creates conditions for infinite stories to unfold.
The individual voice and the chorus
In society, a melody is the voice of the individual. We celebrate single stories: the activist who speaks out, the leader who inspires, the lone genius who disrupts. These moments are powerful, and they can move us. But, by themselves they don’t last.
A harmonic progression is the community. It’s the structures and networks that support the individual voice, amplify it, and make sure it carries forward. A single activist may light a spark, but it is the movement and the interlocking chorus of many voices that sustains change.
Traditional leadership often operates like a melody, prescriptive, linear, one story told repeatedly. But systems-based leadership creates progressions. The best managers don’t micromanage the “melody” of daily tasks; they create the “harmonic structure” within which creativity and adaptation can flourish. Progressions are resilient in ways that melodies are not. A melody can end in silence. A harmonic progression resolves and continues.
Innovation as ecosystem
The same principle applies to innovation. For too long, we’ve lionized the “lone genius,” the person who sees what no one else sees and produces a brilliant idea. This is melody thinking. But melody thinking, like the melody itself, is incomplete without support. Ideas don’t thrive in isolation. A progression thinker understands ecosystems—how collaborators, suppliers, customers, and even competitors interlock to create something bigger than any single part. That’s where leverage comes from. Architecture shows this too. A classical building prescribes movement, like a melody.
But adaptive design creates frameworks that allow infinite uses. A well-designed public square doesn’t dictate your path; it makes countless paths possible. The grid of Manhattan is perhaps the ultimate progression. The same framework supports infinite “melodies” of urban life.
Education offers the same contrast. Traditional pedagogy is melodic: fixed curricula, standardized paths. But progressive education creates learning progressions. The Montessori method, for example, offers structure without prescribing a single route, allowing children to discover their own melodic lines through shared frameworks.
Technology’s tale of two approaches
This distinction is literally built into the tools musicians use. Scoring programs are designed for melody thinkers. They are linear, privileging the notation of a single line. Useful, yes, but fundamentally tied to the individual’s script. Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs), by contrast, are built for progression thinkers. Logic, ProTools, Cubase; these tools thrive on layering, interlocking, and nonlinear experimentation. They don’t just capture melodies; they record textures, frameworks, and the dialogue between parts. The leverage difference is striking. DAWs amplify progression thinkers, just as Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), platforms, and the internet itself do. An API doesn’t dictate what you build; it provides the harmonic foundation for infinite applications. The internet doesn’t prescribe content; it enables billions of performances within one progression. Technology, like music, is shifting from melody to progression.
The Berkshires as living progression
Here in the Berkshires, the metaphor becomes reality. Our region is not built on a single melody. It is a harmonic progression of cultural voices: Tanglewood, Jacob’s Pillow, MASS MoCA, The Clark, local theaters, writers, artisans, innovators, and small businesses. None of them alone defines this region. But interlocking, resonating, and continuing together, they make the Berkshires a cultural mecca. One voice could not do this. But a progression of voices, moving together, creates something that endures.
This framework shapes how I approach my work as a Concertizing KeyNoter, fusing music and message. When I play a melody while speaking, it competes with my words. The audience must choose between the tune and the message. But when I ground the music in progressions, the harmony supports the words without stealing attention. The progression can shift to minor when the subject gets serious, suspend when I pose a question, and cadence when I make a point. Because I improvise, I need that flexibility. The progression becomes my partner, invisible, supportive, responsive. The audience doesn’t need to recognize the tune; they simply feel the atmosphere carrying the ideas forward.
The deeper current
We should not undervalue melody. It is where ideas often begin. It captures attention. It moves us. But without progression, without underlying structures, communities, ecosystems, and tools, melody fades.
Whether designing cities, leading teams, educating minds, building platforms, or facilitating conversations, the most powerful structures don’t constrain possibility; they multiply it. And the Berkshires reminds us every day that our strength is not in a single note, but in the progressions we make together. Because in the end, harmonic progressions really do speak louder than melodies.
