What Makes Good Melody

the last video I made was on the death of melody the idea that in modern western music melody has been left by the wayside it's not really important anymore and though there may be catchy tunes which we can sing along with melody isn't really used as an expressive tool anymore and in this video I said I'd look at what makes good melody what does it mean to have an expressive melody and how might we save melody as you can imagine almost all of my videos get demonetised immediately because I use a lot of musical examples if you want to help this channel or buy me a coffee to say thank you you can visit my patreon page we have suggestion boxes Q&A I post photos comments behind the scenes of what I'm doing have a visit and come join the community so what makes good melody can we even answer that question I'm not gonna try and give a formula there is no magic formula to writing a good tune or melody I just want to give some principles or ideas in fact this section might become a little philosophical and that's because we're going into grounds which are far more expansive than just a few convenient musical examples so let's go we hear a musical line in terms of motion moving up and down high and low rising and falling a musical line has movement and that's why traditional notation is such a useful depiction of what the music is doing take this melody for example I think it's an excellent depiction of how we hear movement in music as it pushes up up up and then falls back down again [Music] but also we hear a melody as having some kind of internal logic it's not just one note after the next note note note note note these notes are connected somehow in one long line we don't hear this and think ah yes eight independent notes in a row no we hear it as one line eighth notes but connected together as one thought the notes are somehow connected to each other one to the next so that they make more sense together than they would on their own so to summarize that we hear melody as a line which goes through a kind of musical motion simple right remember that we'll come back to it later now I've mentioned this before but humans are extraordinarily good at empathy we are able to share somewhat in other people's grief joy or even more complex emotions and we share in these emotions simply by watching them or being around them there's no logical reason for us sharing in someone else's sadness if we have no reason to be sad ourselves and yet we do feel a great deal of empathy for one another perhaps you can see where I'm going with this I think something strangely similar happens with music just as we can empathize with another person we can in a funny kind of way empathize with music too to have a deficit in empathy is often a symptom of being a narcissist a sociopath or a psychopath and I think Shakespeare made this connection between music and empathy when he writes in The Merchant of Venice the man that hath no music in himself let no such man be trusted so how does music connect with our empathy well first something happens to us when we hear a strong beat or rhythm when we hear a good beat we can't help dancing to it or at least we're tempted to move to it there's nothing complex or surprising about that I actually don't mr. empathy rather this could be somewhat related to a biological mechanism called rhythmic entrainment when certain organisms are exposed to a consistent beat those organisms will begin to sync up with that beat they use this technique in shopping malls they play fast music if they want you to move faster and slower music if they want you to take your time but that's not really the same as empathy so what about melody well I said we hear melody as a long moving line and when we hear this movement we might also feel this movement a corresponding motion within us it might also compel us to move along with it not jump and dance but move with a good melody and this movement this motion this dance within us corresponding with the movement of the melody could be a musical equivalent of empathy this reaction to the motion the flow the direction of a melody can activate our empathetic response this might sound like a load of nonsense I'm no qualified philosopher so now that I've tried to explain this idea let me show you what I mean and as I go through these examples think about this empathetic response within you and how it reacts to the motion to flow the direction of the music let's look at Tchaikovsky first one of the great melodies here is the second movement from his fourth symphony the melody seems to tell a story [Music] and if we let ourselves move along with it we might feel what it's expressing [Music] I'd encourage you to listen to the whole thing but later on it does this [Music] doesn't that leap in the melody seem particularly expressive of something you can't put it into words but you can put it into music and we can then feel it through our empathetic response to its motion or of course there's his love theme from Romeo and Juliet how it suddenly bubbles and overflows in passion but we don't need to be told that we can feel it for ourselves you'll also notice that these melodies have a larger range than just three notes but they also have an expressive character about them that if we truly let our internal empathy move along with these lines we can really feel what they're trying to say you couldn't really say the same about this what makes Tchaikovsky's melodies stand out is that they have range character movement and they tell some kind of expressive story and so I think that this sense of motion is crucial to a good melody in fact I think a melody with more motion range dynamism and direction is generally speaking much more expressive than a melody which just stays on one or three notes it's through the motion and range of a melody that it is able to tell a story okay so Tchaikovsky writes great tunes but good melody doesn't always have to mean a great tune it just needs that motion that character that expressive direction so let's look at something that is not a great tune in itself but simply uses melody as an expressive tool take the end of Wagner's masterpiece Tristan and Isolda if you're over 16 years old or 18 in the USA what does this music sound like what do you think vogner is trying to express here [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] and he makes that thought last a full 10 minutes which is actually longer than average so I've talked about feeling the motion of a melody and how that might activate our empathy but this might become more apparent when we sing a really good melody there's something about singing a good tune that can bring the musical experience to life let's just think about national anthems for a second I don't really like ours I think the melody is pretty bland [Music] I think a lot of Englishmen would prefer that this was our national anthem instead this hymn is by the great English composer Hubert Perry who kick-started a renaissance in English music and perhaps it would now be our national anthem if it wasn't titled Jerusalem meaning place of peace so why would we prefer to sing Jerusalem than god save the queen' well in our current national anthem the melodic line is boring and it's range is barely 1/6 [Music] even when it rises up to the more emotional section the melody continues to be boring predictable and pretty absent of any significant motion but perhaps more importantly it just feels bland to sing try it yourself it doesn't help that the words aren't particularly inspiring either but what about Jerusalem well firstly the words are awesome but more importantly the music has expressive motion and direction it has more range within the first five notes it's already out spanned the range of god save the queen' but listen to the second part of the song how it starts down low but with passion and builds up words until the climax in the third line [Music] [Music] the words are great on their own but singing them breathes a new kind of expressive life into them again this melody has range character movement and it tells some kind of expressive story and anyone who's had the fortune to sing this in a community whether it's at a rugby match in church at a school assembly or at the pub may recall how good it feels to sing a really good tune and how boring it might feel to sing a mediocre one and by the way if you want a really crazy powerful national anthem try the Russian one just don't get too carried away so as I said singing melody to a text gives it some sense of heightened expressivity gregorian monks knew this over a thousand years ago when they started putting melody to their texts instead of just speaking them and modern mosques still do that heightened speech singing today raising prayer above the normality of common speech and that heightened expressivity is exactly the point I'm trying to make about melody the melody is not merely a catchy tune it can be one of the central tools for telling a story for expressing something for activating our empathetic response especially when that melody has a good range character movement and expressive direction but what about today I said in my video on the death of melody it's unfashionable to have a big old tune most people think they don't want an interesting melody modern art tends to want something edgier darker or more bare something like this is it possible to make an edgy modern art piece while still writing great melody well I think so yes if you handle it well this piece is called passion and resurrection by Erik session belts this takes a bunch of the darkest most harrowing and also the most direct and moving text from Byzantine and biblical sources and modernizes them in that edgier darker way now Asha Bell says himself that he often prefers writing harmonies to melodies but here he takes the melodic values I've talked about in this video that is heightening expression elevating the text by singing it to a moving musical line which activates our empathise that's all here so as the woman weeps for her transgressions washing Christ's feet with her hair and her tears listen to how the melodic line enhances the text how it adds expression to it and drama [Music] [Music] or even when there are few words to go by he manages to create melodies which are expressive which captivate us and yet which somehow feels so modern and in line with the popular aesthetic of today [Music] so yes though melody is largely out of fashion and not used very often in current music it is possible to find ways to use it while still meeting your aesthetic goals it is as I hope I've explained here one of the best tools for capturing our empathy telling us a musical story expressing something personal to us which could not be substituted with words and I hope that melody my tree emerge in the future spread her wings again and bear an incredible new wave of melodic music in whatever form that might take I hope you enjoyed this video I plan to continue making videos like this on music of all kinds if you want to help support this channel help me to produce more content like this or simply buy me a coffee to say thank you then you can visit my patreon page and join the community and if you enjoyed this video then do subscribe like the video and share it with your friends thanks for watching

Channel: Inside the Score

Views: 264,569

Rating: 4.9324179 out of 5

Keywords: what makes good melody, how to save melody, melody, music education, music appreciation, musical appreciation, tchaikovsky, wagner, esenvalds, billie eilish, lady gaga, understanding, video essay, classical music, tune, tunes

Id: wQWgsr88GQI

Length: 16min 23sec (983 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 09 2019