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Part 3:
Tunes
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on the traditional labeling of tones using the letters A through G. Each tone in
the song is assigned a letter corresponding to its precise pitch; anyone reading
the letters knows which tone to sing or play.
Assigning tones, of course, is only half the story. When you sing “Mary Had a
Little Lamb,” you give each tone a specific rhythmic value; each tone takes up
a specific place in time. The rhythm of the song is described by using different
note values, the half notes and quarter notes that we call music notation.
By combining the pitch values with the rhythmic values, we can now notate the
entire melody of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” The notes on the staff tell us what
pitches to sing; the note values tell us how long to sing each pitch.
The result looks like this:
The complete melody for “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
All melodies are described using similar notation. You set the key signature and
the time signature up front, and then fill in the notes of the melody from there.
Naturally, you have to arrange the notes within measures, with each measure
holding the appropriate number of beats. When you’re done writing down the
notes, you’ve written your melody.
Common Melodic Techniques
Every song—every piece of music—has a melody. Some longer pieces (such as
much orchestral music) have multiple melodies. Some melodies consist of mul-
tiple parts, with different parts repeated in different parts of the song. However
the music is constructed, the melody is the heart of the song—the part you should
be able to sing or hum or whistle all by itself, with no other instruments needed.
To get a feel for how melodies are constructed, let’s take a look at some melodies
from well-known pieces of music. You’ll see that although they all have their
distinct sound and feel, these melodies also have a lot of factors in common.
Dvorˇák’s
New World Symphony
We’ll start with a tune from Antonin Dvorˇák’s
Symphony #9 in E minor (“From
the New World”)
—more popularly known as the
New World Symphony.
This is a
popular piece of orchestral music, and consists of several different sections; the
Chapter 8:
Melodies
melody we’ll look at is just one of many used throughout the work, and it goes
like this:
93
One of the main melodies in Dvorˇák’s
New World Symphony.
Let’s first get a feel for the mechanics of the melody. As you can see, the time
signature for this melody is 4/4, so there are four quarter-note beats in each
measure. The key signature is D
, with five flats. When you listen to it, the
melody has a happy sound, which means it’s in a major key—D
Major, to be
precise. The piece of the melody we’re looking at is four measures long.
If you look at (or listen to) this melody carefully, you’ll see that it breaks into
two two-measure phrases. The first two measures end on a note (E
) that doesn’t
feel like an ending note (it’s the second note in the scale); this sets up a kind of
tension that you want to hear resolved. The second two measures resolve the
tension by effectively repeating the first two measures, but ending on a more
satisfying tone—D
, the tonic of the scale.
This is a common technique, setting up some sort of tension in the first part of
the melody that is then resolved in the second part. This helps to make a melody
interesting; if you think about it, it’s also a very logical, symmetrical, almost
mathematical construction. (If you look at it like a mathematical formula, the
first half of the melody “equals” the second half.)
Another technique used in this melody is the repetition of specific rhythms. Look
at the rhythmic pattern used throughout—dotted eighth note, sixteenth note, and
quarter note. This “dum de duh” pattern is played twice in the first measure,
and twice again in the third measure, establishing a kind of rhythmic signature
for the entire piece. This rhythmic repetition helps to establish a familiarity for
the listener; you hear the rhythm once, then you hear it again, and it feels
familiar; almost comfortable. In fact, a listener
expects
to hear some repetition; if
every measure of a melody is completely different from all the preceding meas-
ures, the melody will be difficult to remember.
Bach’s
Minuet in G
Our next example is Johann Sebastian Bach’s
Minuet in G
—although you might
be familiar with it as the melody of the pop song “A Lover’s Concerto,” per-
formed by the Toys back in the mid-1960s.
This melody differs from Dvorˇák’s melody in a number of ways. First, it’s in 3/4
time; not 4/4. Second, it’s in the key of G, and is based on the G Major scale.
Beyond those differences, there are a lot of similar techniques in use. Note the
rhythmic repetition between measures 1-2 and 3-4, and the continued repeti-
tion of the first measure in measures 5 through 7. Also note the very slight ten-
sion created in measure 4 (the end of the first half of the melody—it sounds like
there’s more coming), which is then resolved in the second half of the melody.
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