- Hi, I'm Gareth Green and in this video we're going to be thinking
about adding elegance to a melodic line. Now, a lot of composers let me know that they're kind of reasonably happy coming up with a melody, but they sometimes feel
it's a bit unexciting, sort of a bit stop, go. It sort of somehow lacks something that would just kind of add a little bit of icing to the cake, as it were. Now, one very useful
way of dealing with this is to think about
incorporating appoggiaturas, and that's what I'm going
to focus on in this video. And we're going to see three
sort of slightly different ways of using an appoggiatura to
just enliven a melodic line and to make it work
with even more elegance. Now, it doesn't really
matter what the style of your writing is, because appoggiaturas can be applied in any style. I'm kind of doing something in this video that's a little bit in a
classical period style, a kind of Hayden Mozart sort of style but you can apply this in
any other genre at all. What I love about these things sometimes is how I kind of explain
something in one musical context and somebody does something with it in a totally different musical context, and then they write to me and say how it's liberated things for them. That's great, fantastic. Music is music, doesn't
matter what the style is. Okay, now let's have a little look at this example that
I've just put together. I've kind of just written
a four bar thing here in a kind of classical period
style, and it goes like this. Now you listen to that and you think, "Well, doesn't sound too bad, does it? "I mean, what doesn't work about that?" All the melody notes fit the chords. You can kind of feel
where the tune is going. Yeah, it's okay, isn't it? But could it work even better? That's what we're going
to explore in a moment. One of its difficulties is at the moment that most of the notes in the
melody belong to the chords. They're essential notes or
harmony notes or chord tones, however you know them. Because when I start at the beginning, I'm in the key of C major
and I'm using chord I. These notes belong to chord I. Nothing wrong with that at all. That's absolutely fine. You can spin a melody
just by kind of bouncing between the notes of the chord. When I get to this chord, this is chord V7 in its second inversion and this note in the melody
belongs to the chord. No problem at all. On we go. This is chord V in its first inversion. This note belongs to that. This is what we call a passing
note or a passing tone. This note kind of makes it a seventh, so it turns that chord V into a V7. This note belongs to the chord V. Then all of this belongs
to chord I and so on. But maybe it's just a little bit plain and also you have this
sense of the music goes and then it stops, it goes, then it stops, it sort of goes, and then it stops. So you sort of mean this
sort of stop go thing. And sometimes this is the
fundamental difficulty that people have. It's kind of like I've
got this one bar phrase, another one bar phrase, a two bar phrase. It sort of belongs to
this four bar statement, but it breaks down in that sort of way. So what can we do? Well, appoggiaturas are the answer, or one of the possible answers. So what I'm going to do
now is I'm going to play the original thing that I've just played and then I'm going to play a version of exactly the same piece of music that's got appoggiaturas in it and we'll see what it
sounds like, first of all, before we explore how to write them. So here's the original. Okay, here's the lower version. Now, hopefully you can hear and see that it's the same piece of music, but suddenly those elaborations kind of make it much more successful. It makes it feel more
elegant, which is interesting. And it also just kind of mitigates this sort of stop go
thing a bit, doesn't it? And it makes the melody
work rather better. So let's have a look at
what we're talking about. So what's an appoggiatura? An appoggiatura is translated
into English as leaning note. And an appoggiatura effectively takes half the value of itself
and the note that follows. Let me explain that for a moment because the first appoggiatura comes here. Now, this is elaborating this note. So this note has two beats. So what I do is I say, well,
I'll have one of those beats on the appoggiatura and one
of those beats on the note. So half the value has
gone to the appoggiatura and the other half of the
value is left to the note, so that this total appoggiatura situation is the same value as the note
that we've decorated, okay? Now, the point is we've
decorated this note B, this one here, and we
said earlier, didn't we, that B belongs to this chord. It's a dominant seventh chord, a V7 Chord, and B belongs to it. Now, you'll notice that
C doesn't belong to it. So C is the appoggiatura,
the leaning note, and the appoggiatura is
dissonant with the chord. So that's an important thing
and that's why we lean on it, because it's a dissonance
followed by a consonant. So if you listen to the impact
of this first measure here, this first bar. Can you hear that I'm leaning on this note because that's the appoggiatura
and it's dissonant. It doesn't belong to this chord. It clashes with it,
but it resolves by step onto a note that belongs to the chord. So you feel a kind of
tension and then a release. So you always lean on an appoggiatura. This is a very important thing to realise if you're a performer. Spot where the appoggiaturas come so you can lean on the appoggiatura and step back onto the note that follows, because the note that follows
resolves the dissonance of the appoggiatura. And when the appoggiatura
goes onto its resolution, that's something we
expect to happen by step. It's going to a neighbouring note. It's often going down,
but it doesn't have to. It's going onto the neighbouring note. But you can see, you can
kind of feel that tension of the appoggiatura and you can see how it kind of sounds
much more interesting than the rather more plain
thing that we started with. So just looking at that
first measure again, that first bar, the original. Now the decorated version
with the appoggiatura. You can hear the impact
of that, can't you? Okay, well in the second bar I'm going to use another
appoggiatura because when we get here this note is an appoggiatura, D-sharp. Now some of you might be thinking, "Well, you know what on
earth is going on now "because if we're in the key of C major, "D-sharp isn't in the key of C major." You are absolutely right, it isn't. And also I've purposely tried to include an appoggiatura here that
resolves upwards by step. Having said that they often
resolve downwards by step. It's perfectly possible
that an appoggiatura can resolve upwards by step. But why is it a D-sharp? This is what we call a
chromatic appoggiatura. It's chromatic because it's using a note that doesn't belong to the key. So sometimes if you want to
add even a bit more spice, a bit more colour to
your music, you can say, "Well, I'm going to finish on
E and E belongs to this chord, "this is chord I in the the key of C." And I could use a note that's
one above the E or one below. So I could go F, E. Or I could go D, E but it could be even more
juicy if I go D-sharp, E and make it a semitone instead of a tone, a half step instead of a whole step. And you hear that, it's kind of a rather nice
added colour and dissonance. And it flows on very nicely
from the previous note because we go up chromatically
from D to D-sharp to E. So you see how that works? And then you see the impact
of the first two measures because the first bar
ends with an appoggiatura resolving downwards that's not chromatic. The second bar ends with an
appoggiatura resolving upwards that is chromatic. So you see how that works. Now, what have I done in the third bar? Well, I've got two appoggiaturas
next door to each other. So you notice in the
original we went from F to D. So there's the F, there's the D, which means that this is an appoggiatura and this is an appoggiatura. Okay, so instead of going. I'm using the note above
each of those notes first. So you hear dissonance,
consonance, dissonance, consonance, leaning note, resolution,
leaning note, resolution, appoggiatura, chord tone,
appoggiatura, chord tone. So you see how that just
adds another element to it. It makes the rhythm a
little bit more lively, which is quite useful. And you feel this dissonance, consonance, dissonance, consonance thing. So they're not chromatic. They're using notes that
belong to the key of C major, but we've got two back-to-back. And you also notice that
the rhythm is faster because here I'm using a pair of quavers, a pair of eighth notes instead of these
crotchets or quarter notes that we used in the first two
bars, the first two measures. And then just at the end, you'll notice how in the original, we just
finished on a chord I in C. And what I've done this time is to say, "Well, let's have a double appoggiatura." So we've got one appoggiatura here, resolving upwards by a step. We've got one appoggiatura here, resolving downwards by a step. So instead of doing the
original thing, which was this. I'm now doing this. So you get a double appoggiatura. Okay, now one thing just to
mop up about appoggiaturas, because I know some people
will be thinking about this, there'll be some people out
there who are sort of thinking, "Well, when is an
appoggiatura an appoggiatura "and when is an
appoggiatura a suspension?" Well, if you know about suspensions, you know suspensions have to be prepared, then they have to be sounded,
then they have to be resolved. So, P, S, R, prepare, sound, resolve. P belongs to the chord
that's sounding at the time. R belongs to the next chord. S is dissonance. So if you like, an
appoggiatura is going S, R. It's sounding, it's resolving. But an appoggiatura doesn't
have to be prepared. So you notice in this case,
D-sharp is not prepared. This is going kind of S
to R, but this is not P. So that's definitely a
chromatic appoggiatura and can't be seen as a suspension. You could say it's a chromatic
accented passing note, because it's going by
step between the D and E, or an accented chromatic passing tone. So, that's perfectly possible. You could look at this one and say "That's definitely an appoggiatura "because it's not prepared. "It's not prepared on the note before." So it's kind of doing
this sounding, resolving, but it's not prepared. So that's an appoggiatura. You could say, "Well,
this is an appoggiatura "because it's doing
exactly the same as this," which is what we're talking about here. You could also say that this
is an accented passing note because it is going by step
between the F and the D and it's coming on a beat, so
it's an accented passing note or an accented passing tone. So in other words what
I'm getting to here is that sometimes an appoggiatura
is an appoggiatura, you know? But sometimes it could be something else, like this could be this
accented chromatic passing note. This one's definitely an appoggiatura, can't be anything else. This is definitely an appoggiatura, but it could be an accented passing note. When you come to this, you could say that this double
appoggiatura in both parts has been prepared because
here the B is prepared. It's sounded, it's resolved. In the tenor part the F is prepared, it sounded, it's resolved. So you could say, "Well,
this is a 4-3 suspension "because it's prepared. "This is a 7-8 suspension
because it's prepared." And quite often 7-8 is combined with 4-3, so as a double suspension. Is it that we should see
this as a double appoggiatura or should we see it as a
double double suspension? The answer is you can see it
as both, but the impact of it is exactly the impact of an appoggiatura, however you want to describe it. This one here is prepared on the second half of that beat, isn't it? Then it's sounded, then it's resolved. So sometimes the relationship
between appoggiaturas and suspensions is quite
close, but an appoggiatura is always an unprepared
suspension as it were, which is what this is. It's kind of going 9-8 above
the bass and it's not prepared. That's definitely an appoggiatura. Often though, appoggiaturas
always kind of could be described as suspensions,
only if they're prepared or they might be described
as passing notes, passing tones if they're moving by step between the note before
and the note after. So that hopefully just clears up a few things about those
details of appoggiaturas. But does it add elegance to your line? I think it does. So if you're not used
to using appoggiaturas and you are feeling that
some of your melodies need a bit more elegance,
a bit more movement, a bit more colour, well, this
might be the way to do it. So you end up with this
version with appoggiaturas. Well, I hope this video
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