How to Write a Melody?

today we're going to discuss melody as a part of this podcast series i'd like to start with a quote by nadia boulanger she's a very famous music composition instructor her quote is to study music we must learn the rules to create music we must forget them now while it probably isn't a good idea for you to forget the rules that we're learning in 151 i do want you to keep in mind that what i'm presenting today is a standard formula for an eight bar melody it's just a standard all of you can go out and find exceptions to everything we're going to discuss today in your favorite music but this is a place to start we need to learn a few terms in order to get going the first two terms are terms that music theorists have been fighting about all along and they still are today those terms are theme and motive melodies are based on themes and motives for the purpose of this class we're going to define a theme as a long melodic idea and we're going to define a motive as a short rhythmic idea comparable to what you would expect in beethoven's fifth symphony when you write your melodies you can make them up of a longer thematic idea or short motives we're going to look a little bit of both today terms related to the music that you see here right what you're looking at are eight empty measures now that looks like a lot of blank real estate especially to someone who's never written a piece of music before we have some terms to describe that eight measure framework everything you see here all eight measures of music is called a period so all of this everything that you're looking at here is a period of music it's made up of eight measures that's the standard length of a typical melody what you see here also are two separate sets of four measures here and also here those are called phrases so this set of four measures is a phrase and this set of four measures is also a phrase those two phrases together combine to make a complete musical sentence which is called a period so a phrase would be sort of a sentence fragment and when you put two phrases together that will equal a period of music you'll notice that each phrase is four measures long that again is the average length for a phrase within a period of music but you can find all sorts of exceptions to those if you look through music that you like there's names for these phrases this first phrase is called either the antecedent phrase or the question phrase that's because it sets the music up it lends you to expect something you need to get something resolved which happens in this second phrase which is called the consequent or the answer phrase so we have a question phrase starts everything out gets the sentence going and then to finish that sentence we have the answer phrase music is all about tension and release and in order to do that we need to have some notes in those measures and the notes in those measures have various names called scale degrees these scale degrees are going to have a different effect on the music depending on how you use them and where you use them these are the scale degree names for c major scale the scale is based on this note right here which is called the tonic you'll notice that the tonic begins the scale the tonic also ends the scale that note determines the key that you're in and that determines the relationship of all of these other scale degrees the tonic is the note that's going to bring your melody to a stop it's the note that gives you the most rest music is all about tension and release and if you want to end that tension if you want to bring your music to a close if you want to stop your melody if you want to complete your musical sentence this is the one you're going to want to use is the tonic so i'm going to use that when red same as you would use for a stop sign because that's the effect that a tonic has it's going to stop what you're doing now the notes that have the most tension the ones that want your melody to move back to that tonic and go ahead and stop you at that point the ones that are going to make that motion forward are these three the dominant and i'm going to underline those with green because those are the ones that have the most forward moving force we have a leading tone and we also have the subdominant right so those particular three notes are the three notes that cause the most tension that are in the greatest need of resolution to get back to the tonic now you'll notice we have three other scale degrees there the supertonic the mediant and the submediant those three are the ones that they won't give you the same feeling of rest as you would get in a tonic but they will still give you a need to move forward so we're going to put those in blue because they don't have the same amount of restful quality as the tonic obviously but they also don't have the same need to move the music forward as the dominant the leading tone and also the subdominant so these here marked in blue so these are different levels of tension and what you can do is as you're writing your melody you can control how much tension and release you have in that particular melody by where you use these particular scale degrees now we also need some tools to build melody melodies are built using two things they're built using steps and they're built using leaps if you have steps in melody you have something called conjunct motion where everything moves very smoothly from one note to the next if you have leaps in the melody you have something called disjunct motion where things shift around and they bounce around between different notes so it's not as smooth moving in a scale would be conjunct motion leaping around anything larger than a major second so in other words a minor third and larger is disjunct motion and it's caused by a leap most melodies are a combination of steps and leaps all right this is an example of a melody with too many steps and i'm going to go ahead and play that for you right notice that that doesn't really go anywhere it just sort of wanders around right the reason for that is because you have too many steps there and they all sort of just meander around the same point you notice they also don't use any of those high tension notes which are the subdominant dominant and leading tone now i mentioned right at the beginning of this lecture that there's always exceptions to this let me play this example that has too many steps again all right now i'm all i'm going to do is change the rhythm i'm still going to use the same three notes all right a lot of you probably recognize that from the charlie brown series that's a very famous piece from that particular cartoon that uses the same notes but obviously puts a very interesting rhythm so right there even though technically you're only using steps because of the rhythm you're making something interesting so in general you want your melody to be a combination of leaps and steps but there's examples of steps that do work this one isn't one of them here's an example of some steps that work this is a melody by mozart all of you probably will recognize this all right notice we've got a leap here in the beginning but everything after that is all steps this is a very famous melody started out as a french folk song and then mozart did a theme and variation on it you may now know it as twinkle twinkle little star or the abc song but that particular melody has been used quite frequently all over and all of you already know it that's an example of steps that work here's an example of too many leaps all right this melody i'm going to go ahead and play this for you this one doesn't work now you can tell i've i've exaggerated here and i've done all sorts of leaps as a part of this melody but it's not going to sound very good because it just wanders all over without any sense of direction whatsoever okay that's an example of too many leaps that don't work however i can play for you another example by mozart of a melody where the leaps work this particular one you notice almost everything there's a step right here there's a step right here but everything else as you go through are all leaps and this is how this melody sounds right much better than the other one you also need a few more devices in order to write your melody not only do you need steps and leaps but you're also going to need some larger scale structures those are repetition contrast and variation repetition is exactly what you would expect that's where a particular item in the melody it can be a short motive or it can be an entire phrase is repeated in the music you can also use repetition to link two phrases together contrast is when you write two phrases that contain contrasting material that creates tension and interest because you're doing something different and variation is halfway between repetition and contrast that's when you have two phrases that have some recognizable material and some varied material here's an example first of repetition if you look at this particular melody notice it has a combination of steps and leaps so what we talked about steps right here's some leaps right steps here's some leaps but you'll also notice there's a lot of repetition there's repetition within each phrase here's a phrase here's a phrase right repetition right here this segment it's repeated twice within the phrase but it's also repeated between the two phrases so you notice you have that same segment down here this is a different segment that has a leap in it right instead of a step you'll notice that's also repeated down here right so this whole melody this whole eight measure period of music is based on repetition i'll go ahead and play those eight measures for you all right while that may not hit the top 40 charts that particular melody is well put together and you can tell that the two phrases are related now you may not want to write something that is quite that similar that was just an example to give you an idea of how to use repetition so instead you might prefer an example that uses contrast and you'll notice again this one also includes leaps and steps balance between the two all right more steps in the beginning and then some leaps for the contrast in the second phrase here one thing that does happen is you'll notice that there's this little idea here where you have two repeated notes and then a quarter note two repeated notes then a quarter note just to make sure these phrases do seem like they are somewhat belonging together we do have these two notes repeated over here here's this example right even though the two phrases are contrasting they still work partly because of the fact that you have this little motivic idea that ends up being repeated even though these leaps are such a contrast to the beginning statement and the last example is one that includes variation there's two different types of variation that we can look at one of which is variation that can happen between the two four measure phrases and i'll also show you another mozart example where there's variation within one phrase this is an eight measure period that's using variation okay you'll notice we have some measures that have this kind of rhythmic pattern where you have four eighth notes notice we have four eighth notes down here as well but this particular measure has a different pattern notice that these measures are identical they have g e f and d g e f and d this measure starts with a g this measure starts with a g both of them quarter notes there's just enough here that is similar and repeated that you wouldn't want to call this contrast but yet there's also enough that is different that you would call it variation here's this example okay again combination of contrast and repetition gives you variation here's an example that i play all the time in class that is an example of variation where you have similarities and differences just within the first four measures this is a very famous opening of a mozart piano sonata and you'll notice that even though all of these notes are quite different this is set a little lower on the staff this is set a little higher the rhythms are almost identical in this first measure you have a half note and a quarter note and a quarter note this measure here is a half note quarter and quarter second measure you have a longer note value followed by some decorative notes and then a quarter note and a quarter rest and over here you have a longer note value followed by some decorative notes and then a quarter note and a quarter rest that's an example of how you can use variation where there's a lot of difference in the notes but the rhythm ties everything together i'll play that example for you now that we've looked at steps and leaps we've looked at repetition contrast and variation we need to talk about how to go ahead and put together our own melody and for that i'm actually going to use a melody that was written by a 151 class and i'm going to go through the steps that we did to get to this point with this melody and keep in mind this is just one example you can go ahead and write your own and choose whatever you'd like to do and this class went through it and the reason i picked this particular melody is that most classes are pretty careful they're pretty conservative when we go through this and write a melody as a class they're worried about getting things wrong so they don't want to do something different or out of the ordinary well this class was never worried about doing anything wrong and they really like to do things out of the ordinary so this melody is the one i'm going to use it's it's a good combination of steps and leaps it's a good combination of variation and repetition but they also do some interesting things with those scale degrees some of you who have never written a melody before probably looking at these eight blank measures and the temptation is to start writing here at beat one and go ahead and just write until you finish over here at the end of measure eight the problem with that is you sort of end up writing the equivalent of a run-on sentence where the melody just doesn't seem to hang together and doesn't make sense there's some easy ways to do this and you think of it the same way you think of building a house before you put on the siding before the drywall goes on you have to sort of create a framework and that's what we're going to do here in this framework the first thing you have to do is you have to let the listener know what key you're in you have to introduce the tonic so here in measure one you're going to want to have a tonic okay that's one place that you need to do that in order for someone to start recognizing the difference between that tension and release that's going to happen between those various scale degrees so we're going to start with the tonic we obviously need a time signature so that we have a framework for what we put in each measure so we're going to work with 2 4. i do that in class just because it's it's easier to write a complete eight measure melody when you're only working on two beats per measure but melodies can be any different time signature so at this point we have a tonic here we know we're in two four right the next benchmark the next part of your framework you can create is where you're going to end up at the end of measure eight now in order to make a complete musical sentence what you have to do is you have to create that feeling of rest that feeling of stopping the way you do that is by ending on the tonic again remember that's that scale degree that creates that feeling of rest so we're ending on the tonic now when you start and end on the tonic when you're introducing the tonic here in measure one or when you're ending on the tonic it doesn't work very well to use a small note value you aren't going to want those tonics to be on a 16th note the reason for that is if you start on a 16th note and that's all someone gets for the tonic at the beginning it doesn't give them a chance to get used to what that tonic is and then they have a hard time putting it in a frame of reference with the rest of your scale degrees likewise over here in measure eight you're also going to want to give your tonic some time because you want to create that feeling of stop you want to create a complete musical sentence the only way you can do that is if you make that note value long enough in 2 4 time you've only got two beats so i usually recommend that you go ahead and plan for a half note tonic in measure eight because that's the only thing that's really going to give you the feeling of stopping if you were to take those two beats and just do your tonic as a little eighth note over here way at the end of the measure it's sort of the equivalent of driving up to a stop sign and slamming on the brakes at the last minute or sort of running through so you want to make sure there's time for that tonic to sound to let everyone know that you're stopping the next step is to look at this eight measure period of music you know you've got to be on the tonic here you know you've got to be on the tonic here that's still a lot of empty measures in between to try and make a decision as to what you're going to do the way to handle that is to remember that the eight measure period is made up of two four measure phrases and one of them is the question phrase and one is the answer phrase so what that means is you can go ahead and decide how you're going to control this point right here this point in the middle between measure four and measure five by either allowing some rest to happen right there or allowing tension to happen based on the scale degrees you put in at that point for example your two phrases can be stand alone very enclosed phrases if you start each of them on the tonic and you end each of them on the tonic that's going to create a closed-off phrase for you so we could do that okay those two phrases each of them would stand alone there won't be any tension at all between this first phrase and the second phrase but you also have other options for example if you want this first phrase to have some tension that's going to want to move back here instead of doing the tonic at this point you could do the dominant all right if you do the dominant that's one of those high tension members of the scale degrees that is then going to move back to this tonic and really set you up to have to have this second phrase in order to finish off this note that you left hanging at the end of the first phrase if you don't want this tension to resolve and instead you want to keep this tension going all the way until this last tonic then what you want to do is not provide the tonic over here so you could do anything else at that point you could continue the dominant or you could go to any other scale degree that's going to move you to somewhere other than the tonic so in other words this point right here you can decide how much tension you want in your melody based on which scale degrees you stop on at measure four and where you pick up at measure five this particular class opted for creating a lot of tension all right so i've showed you the least tension which was stopping on tonic and starting on tonic that's what most classes want to do but this particular class melody i'm going to do for you today all of the students really wanted to create a high tension melody so what they chose for measure four was actually the leading tone right the leading tone in the melody is that note it's remember it's the seventh degree of the scale that really wants to resolve up that half step to the tonic so that leading tone is going to create probably the most maximum amount of tension you can have in a melody in order to move you to the next measure they not only wanted to create that tension in measure four but they wanted to continue that tension by not going to the tonic in measure five but by actually going somewhere different so where they're going to choose to go and i'm going to write that up above here so that it shows up is the submediant so they actually not only set this up to go to leading tone but they really wanted to try something different and see what happened and they set this up so that it went to the leading tone here and then not only did they not allow that to resolve but they took it to a rather non-traditional note which was one of those blue notes on our scale degrees remember those were supertonic mediant and submediant one of those notes that don't have a high feeling of tension but also don't put you back at the tonic the nice thing now even though this looks like it's a little scribbled on is now you're not looking at eight blank measures that you have to fill in right what you're looking at instead is a framework you know where you need to start you know what your goal is by the end of measure four right you know where you're going to pick up and measure five and you also know what your goal is in measure eight so a lot of this is already written for you it's not quite as empty as it was before so here's what they did they actually started out with here's your tonic i started out with a c quarter note right so that's our first note and in a two four measure that's a good length because it gives you a chance to get that tonic in your ear but it doesn't stop you for example if you would sit on a half note for that whole measure that's not going to give you a whole lot of forward motion at this point you want something that's going to need to move at the same time that you also want something that's going to introduce your tonic so that's a perfect length for here they decided to start with steps so they're going to follow that with two steps like this and the other thing that you want to do too is listen to your melodies if you have a way to have access to a keyboard you'll want to play them or you can also use your online keyboard but you want to listen as you're writing too so that you know what you're putting together so here's their first measure right that was their first measure and of course also remember the last measure that's already done for you and i'm going to put these in parentheses for right now because remember depending on where your melody ends up you can either go to this tonic which would be up higher on the staff or you can go to this one down lower so we don't know for sure we know this measure's done because we have to sit on tonic and because it's only 2 4 time we're going to want to give that the full two beats so we're already done with this look you've already got two measures done out of your 8 without even really writing that much yet so we're going to leave those though because we have to decide which one we're going to want what they did is as a class they looked at this and said okay we have all these steps here we need a leap and because this was a class that like to live dangerously this is the leap that they did they went all the way up here which is a rather uncharacteristic leap it's a large leap it's a leap of a seventh but if you put it in and if you use it correctly you can actually make it work so they decided to make this a dotted quarter now one of the things they also did is if you take a leap especially a leap that large most of the time it sounds good to move back in the opposite direction of that leap in order to make that work better it's just something that our ears prefer to hear us fill in that gap we created as opposed to take another leap you have to be really careful remember we listened to two melodies one where those leaps didn't sound like they were related at all and the mozart one where the leaps did work but you do need to be careful especially with a large leap like that to make it sound like it works out well we tried a few things that we didn't like as a class but we ended up with this i went back here and ended up with that all right which worked well because that way we're coming out of that big leap and when we're resolving that back down just a step so this is what we have so far for those two measures okay so we have steps leaps they decided to follow that with some more steps make sure you can read these so another measure of steps instead now at this point they had already decided they needed to go to the leading tone so they had no choice here and they did go to the leading tone but what they did just to make it a little more interesting instead of just sitting on a half note which gives you that feeling of really stopping is they made this another dotted quarter which again sort of reminds everyone of the dotted quarter that you had back here and then put in an eighth rest all right so here is their first phrase okay interesting because of the leap and then sounds good because it's followed by a step and then a combination of alternating between stepwise motion here stepwise motion here and then the dotted quarter and the dotted quarter so that whole phrase works together nicely now the catch is how do you write this second phrase to be contrasting repetition variation of this first phrase so that the two phrases together make sense remember they decided they wanted to go to the submediant here so they had to go to an a because that's the submediant and they decided to mimic this motion a little bit in here but change things and again this class like to try doing things different so they actually came up with sort of a interesting use for this measure very much on the end of contrast which is they're doing stepwise motion which is the same motion that they started here but what they decided to do instead is actually make this into a triplet okay so that comes totally out of the blue is definitely contrast compared to the first phrase so here's the first phrase there's your triplet now at this point as a class we discussed the fact that you know we hadn't had a triplet before it's a nice interesting addition to the melody but it's so different that we want to make sure we put in something that's going to remind us of what we set up up in the first phrase so at this point this is what they decided to do they went up here and did this okay and again some of this happens with trial and error where they would try some measures first they wouldn't like something and they try something else so this isn't just the one solution they came up with right away so you should assume for your own melodies there may be some measures and some things you try that aren't going to work out as well either and you want to try again notice that the nice thing about this is we've got this very different measure here that brings in some contrast but then this a to the g mimics that jump of a seventh the same as you had this jump of a seventh here and then dotted quarter to eighth mimics dotted quarter to eighth and the fact that this moves by step and this moves by step what happens then is you do have this very different material but you can pull it off because you tie it together with something that's almost identical to what happened in the first phrase and notice it even happens at the same point between measure one and two which is the first two measures of the first phrase and between measures five and six which is the first two measures of the second phrase so that ties these two together okay so here's what they had at this point okay now at this point because you've set up your framework already you only have one measure left to right so all you need to do is get from here to here now usually if you've only got two beats left good rule of thumb is is if you're sitting this high on the staff what's going to happen is you're going to want to use this tonic because this one down here it's going to be really difficult to get yourself all the way from here all the way down to this tonic this one's closer okay so we're going to stick with this tonic at that point and we need to get to that tonic and what the class ended up doing was this okay what that does is it does another leap of a seventh but this time going in the opposite direction these two went up this one goes down this time but it also mimics the same rhythm and the same stepwise motion that you had here in measure one so you're tying these two measures together so again even though you've got some very different elements in this second phrase you're putting them together in a way that works well so here's the entire melody right and there it is and it works very nicely now again keep in mind i went through this melody in that the class did by not putting through every single thing that we tried to get to this point so keep in mind that for your own melodies you may not be happy with the first set of measures you come up with you may need to rework some spots but at least if you give yourself some guidelines it'll be easier than just trying to write from beat one of measure one all the way to the end of measure eight without any guide posts along the way to give you some idea of how to put your melody together all right go out and write your first melody and enjoy

Channel: fastforwardable

Views: 1,433,646

Keywords: music, writing, Melody, classical

Id: rl-V2IsUprQ

Length: 33min 36sec (2016 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 10 2011