Melodic Features

Introduction

So, how can you actually write a melody? What are the key features of the melody that you can use to dictate a melody? Or sing one? Let's talk about it!

What is a melody?

Well, stated simply, a melody is a single line comprising pitch and rhythm together, combining to create a succession of pitches through time that express a musical statement. Sounds pretty complicated, but in reality, it's pretty simple. Let's take a look at an example. Try not to look at the score unless you need to:

You may have heard this melody before-- it's pretty popular! When listening to the excerpt from 0:00 to 0:27, can you tell what key it's in? If you said harmonic minor, you'd be right! But, how did you know?

Well, you might say because the title says "G minor," to which I would say, fair play. But, if you take a listen to the melody, you an also hear/see that the notes fit within that key (for the most part). Now, look at the bass line, played by the cellos and basses for the first phrase. What are the names of the notes in relation to G minor? Well, G is the tonic, then F# is the leading tone, D is the dominant, and G is the tonic again. Why does it matter? Well, by finding these relationships (and remembering that the leading tone and dominant both want to resolve back to the tonic), we start to see a clearer key relationship develop. It seems that the note G is what this opening phrase revolves around.

But I digress. The point is that this melody revolves around the G harmonic minor scale. And in fact, melodies in general are often derived from specific scales and are often organized in patterns of musical motives and phrases.

So, what's a phrase? Well, these definitions are more nebulous, but generally speaking, a motif is a musical idea. For example, the opening motif in this piece is this:

See how small this is? Well, composers often string together multiple motives to make a phrase (often of 4, 8, or 16 measures long). Motives thus can be developed throughout the course of a musical composition or passage by pitch alone, rhythm alone, or the complete pitch-rhythm combination. See how Mozart develops this motif into a longer line:

Check out this video to learn more about motivic development:

Let's try analyzing another melody in this piece for practice. Take a look at the excerpt from 0:49 to 1:06. A portion of the violin part, in treble clef, is shown below.

There are two ideas going on here. The first one seems to be the main idea, so we call this the melody. What timbre is playing it?

If you said the strings (or violin), you'd be right! We also have another melody going on in a call-and-response texture (which we'll learn more about later). This is called the countermelody. What timbre do you hear?

Now, as you listen to this excerpt, notice how there is still certainly an influence of G minor, given the starting and ending chords. For example, the phrase ending at 0:57 ends with a tonic G minor chord. But what other scale influences this excerpt?

Contour, Register, and Range

How else can we describe this melody? Well, I would say the melody generally starts high and goes down. This describes the contour, or the general shape created by the specific rise and fall of pitches, within the melody. Contour is important, because it is a good idea to have the highest point in contour align with the desired climax of the melody. Listen to the contour of your favorite pop songs to see what I mean!

Along with contour, register describes the relative span of pitch (e.g. high, medium, or low) of notes in a given melody. How would you describe the register of this melody? I would describe it as a fairly medium-high melody, especially given it is on the violin.

Finally, range describes how condensed (or expanded) the melody is. For example, this melody is fairly condensed, spanning less than an octave (from the high G to low A). 

Conjunct vs Disjunct

There is one other way we can describe melodies, this time relating to the intervals contained within it. But first, can you remember what a step is? Or a leap?

That's right a step is simply an interval of a second, and a leap is an interval of anything bigger than a step. 

So, we can simply count how many steps vs leaps there are in a melody, and then assign it a descriptor. If there are more steps than leaps, then we'd say the melody is relatively conjunct. If there are more leaps, we say it is disjunct. So what would you say for the melody above?

I'd say it is pretty conjunct! How about the first melody of the piece? That one is more tricky, as there are more leaps interspersed. So, it is probably a mix of both.

Vocal Melodies

In vocal music, text (aka lyrics in pop music) is set to melody, and elements of the text and pitch may relate. This is called text setting, and really just describes how the text is literally set to music. There are two ways text can be set:

If each syllable of the text corresponds to a single pitch, the text setting is called syllabic.

If each syllable of text is sung with two or more pitches, the text is said to be melismatic.

Thinking about pop songs you listen to, which is more common? If you said syllabic, you'd be absolutely right! It is so much more common in fact, that each time we hear an instance of one syllable singing multiple pitches, we call it a melisma. Let's take a look at this excerpt from Mozart's opera, The Magic Flute:

Throughout most of this excerpt, you can see that there is one syllable per pitch, hence it is mostly syllabic. However, there are several melismas in the passage. Can you find them?

The biggest ones are at 1:32:31, when the singer sings "Sarastro Todes..." the "ra," "to," and "des" are stretched out to cover to notes each, hence there are three small melismas here.

Toward the end of the passage, we see a transition to a more melismatic type of singing. The word "mehr" is stretched out for a full 8 bar phrase. Note that the singer here mostly sings "ah," but the line under the notes indicates that the word "mehr" is being stretched. Regardless, I certainly do not envy the singer!

Practice

Let's do some practice. Staying in the same opera, label the text setting for these excerpts:

What makes the last one particularly challenging?

Answers:

Describe the contour, register, and range of this melody. How conjunct is it?