What is Descant in Music?

I get asked about the name Descant fairly often. It is my last name, obviously, but it also happens to be an actual musical term. Considering I have spent essentially my entire life making, studying, performing, teaching, and now running a music school, the coincidence is pretty ridiculous.

I did not name myself, so I can't take any credit for it. But the musical meaning of the word has always felt strangely appropriate, and the older I get, the more appropriate it seems.

The Musical Definition of Descant

In music, a descant is a melody or counter-melody that sits above the main melody. You hear it most often in choral music, where the main group continues singing the familiar tune while another singer or section adds an independent melodic line above it.

That upper line is not simply the melody sung higher. It has its own shape and movement while still fitting with the harmony underneath. Descants are commonly associated with soprano voices because of their higher register, but the same idea can also be used instrumentally. A flute, piccolo, violin, trumpet, or another instrument can play an upper line that functions as a descant. Modern definitions still describe a descant essentially this way: an added melody or counterpoint above a principal tune.

An example of an instrumental descant: the piccolo’s upper line in Gustav Holst’s Jupiter from The Planets.

Where the Word “Descant” Comes From

The word has been around for centuries. It comes through Middle English and Anglo-French from the Medieval Latin discantus. The word is related to cantus, meaning song or singing, with the basic idea of a separate musical line existing alongside another.

Historically, though, discant meant something a little different from the soprano line we usually think of today. In medieval music, it referred to a type of polyphony, where another voice was written or improvised against an existing musical line, often a plainsong chant.

That was a pretty important development. Instead of everyone singing the same melody together, musicians were creating separate lines that worked at the same time. Over the centuries, those ideas developed into increasingly complex forms of polyphony and counterpoint.

The meaning of the word changed along with the music. Eventually, descant came to be used for the kind of independent upper melody we generally mean by the term today.

A Lineage of Music

Music was already part of my life long before I had any idea that my last name meant anything musically.

My father is a guitarist and songwriter, and according to the family story, my music education started pretty much immediately. When I came home from the hospital, he put my tiny finger on middle C on the piano and said, “C.”

Then he kept doing it.

Apparently he did this enough that before I could walk, I knew where middle C was. According to my parents, my second word after “ma” was not “da.”

It was “C.”

That piano became the center of pretty much everything for me. By four years old, I was already making up little songs. Two of the earliest were called “Wind in the Willows” and “Sword Fight.” Wind in the Willows centered around F while using the white keys, which effectively gave it an F Lydian sound. Sword Fight centered around A, giving it an A minor sound.

Obviously, I did not know any of those terms when I was four. I was just finding sounds I liked.

What is interesting to me now is that both pieces were already very melody-driven. More than forty years later, that is still basically how I write. Harmony matters enormously to me, but I almost always hear music melodically first. I tend to build everything else around the line.

Drake and Gene Descant featured in the Holyoke Transcript-Telegram in 1990, recognized for their songwriting.

A Lifetime of Music

Growing up, music was never really one of several hobbies I was trying out. It was simply the thing. By twelve, I had gone through the Springfield Conservatory of Music, and as a teenager I studied privately with a Berklee professor. Those lessons regularly stretched far beyond their scheduled time because we would get buried in music theory, composition, harmony, and whatever else I happened to be obsessing over at the time.

That was also when I really discovered Chopin. His music had a huge effect on me, especially the way melody, harmony, technique, and expression could all work together without any one of them feeling secondary. By high school, being a musician was not something I was considering becoming. It was already how I thought of myself. I wrote constantly, played constantly, and music became the way I processed things, communicated, and increasingly made my way through the world.

I went on to study music at Holyoke Community College and Westfield State, but by then there was never much question about the direction I was headed. Music had already become the center of my life.

The Realities of a Musical Life

Making music for a living is considerably less glamorous than people sometimes imagine.

There are incredible moments, but there are also long drives, terrible load-ins, empty rooms, broken equipment, low-paying gigs, financial uncertainty, rehearsals, practice, missed sleep, and a whole lot of figuring things out as you go.

I spent years touring and eventually performed close to a thousand shows. There is a kind of musical education that only comes from doing that much playing in front of actual people. You learn how to recover when something goes wrong. You learn how to listen. You learn when to lead and when to get out of somebody else's way.

You also learn pretty quickly that knowing music theoretically and functioning as a musician in the real world are related skills, but they are not exactly the same skill.

At the same time, I was teaching.

I started teaching music when I was eighteen and worked at several music schools before eventually opening my own. Teaching forced me to understand music differently. It is one thing to know how to do something yourself. It is another thing entirely to understand why it works, recognize why someone else is struggling with it, and figure out how to explain it in a way that makes sense to that particular student.

Those years of performing, writing, studying, and teaching eventually became the foundation for Descant Music.

Drake Descant teaching a student at Descant Music in early 2022.

Descant Music and Art Studio

I opened Descant Music and Art Studio in Holyoke in 2018.

By that point, I had already been teaching for years, but owning a school changed my perspective again. I was no longer thinking only about how I teach. I had to think about what makes teaching effective in general, how different teachers connect with different students, and what kind of environment helps someone stick with music long enough to actually become a musician.

Today, Descant Music offers private piano, voice, and guitar lessons for children, teenagers, and adults at a wide range of experience levels.

Our teachers do not all teach exactly the same way, and I don't want them to. Good teaching is not about forcing every student through the same sequence in exactly the same manner. Different people learn differently. They have different musical backgrounds, different goals, different strengths, and different reasons for wanting to learn music in the first place.

The common goal is to give students a real musical foundation while helping them develop into the kind of musician they actually want to become.

Some students want to perform professionally. Some want to write songs. Some want to audition for college. Some want to play in bands. Some are adults who have wanted to play piano for thirty years and finally decided to do it.

Those are all legitimate reasons to learn music.

So, What Does “Descant” Mean to Me?

Technically, it is an upper musical line that exists alongside another melody.

Historically, it is connected to some of the early development of polyphonic music.

And personally, it is just my name.

But it is hard not to appreciate the coincidence.

A descant does not replace the melody underneath it. It adds another independent musical voice to something that is already happening. In a way, that is also what teaching music is supposed to do.

A teacher should not be trying to create a copy of themselves. The goal is to give someone enough technique, knowledge, experience, and confidence that they can eventually add their own voice to the music.

That is probably the meaning of the word that matters most to me now.

And I could not have picked a better name for the school if I had tried.

Learn Music at Descant

Descant Music and Art Studio offers private piano, voice, guitar, and bass lessons in Holyoke, Massachusetts for kids, teenagers, and adults.

Whether you are picking up an instrument for the first time, returning after years away, preparing for performances, writing your own music, or trying to take your playing to the next level, we would be happy to help.

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