Melody is a succession of pitches that forms a recognizable unit that has meaning to its creator(s). The linear structure of music in which single notes follow one another.
Before understanding melody and how we talk about and describe it, we need to understand concepts of pitch, interval and scales, which are the building blocks of melody.
Pitch is a single note. Physically, the pitch is linked to the speed of the vibration at which the sound is moving. The faster the vibration, the higher the pitch. This is a sequence of five notes, each one higher than the last one:
The slower the vibration, the lower the pitch. This is a sequence of five notes, each one lower than the next one:
The word Interval refers to the distance in pitch between notes. In any one melody, some of the notes will be close to each other, while others will have bigger intervals. [Do not confuse this with the TIME in between notes, rather focus on the distance in pitch].
In this example, the first set of notes are very close to each other in pitch, with a small intervals between them. Then, after a pause, you will hear another sequence of notes with larger intervals between the notes – the pitches are further apart.
A Scale is a set of notes all in sequential order of pitch; it is a pool of notes from which the notes of the melody are chosen. Melodies are created from the pitches in the scale much like words are created from letters in the alphabet. There are many many different types of scales across the world.
These two scales- the Major and the Natural Minor diatonic scale, are the most common in European music and North American music, and almost all of the songs that we can hear on the radio derive their melodies from these scales.
Major:
Minor:
These scales are from India (scales in India are called rag or raga).
Melodies have distinct qualities that make them identifiable, expressive, and meaningful to listeners. We listen for, and can describe, the melodic character, contour, phrasing, and range. You can hear that the intervals and notes in the previous scales and ragas are different, and so the melodies made from them will sound different.
Melodic Motives are small bits of tunes that are repeated multiple times to produce full melodies. A motive is a musical pattern. For example – in the Happy Birthday song, the notes that go with the beginning of the first and second phrase on the words “Happy Birthday” can be considered a motive because they are the same and repeat in both phrases. Another really famous motive comes at the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. This motive has four notes – three repeated pitches and then one that is lower.
In this example we hear the motive twice; the second time it starts on a lower note than the first time.
Here is the beginning of the symphony. You can hear that almost all of the melody contains this motive, which is spun out and repeated over and over again.
In this example from Ghana, in West Africa, the flutes have several motives that keep repeated.
Melodic character: traits of the melody with respect to interval size. Are the intervals small or large? are there many small intervals and some large ones? where are the small intervals in the melody, and where are the large intervals?
Melodic motion primarily in small intervals is conjunct. Melodic motion with in larger intervals is disjunct. Most melodies combine conjunct and disjunct motion, so as you describe the melody, discuss where the melody is conjunct and where it is disjunct. For example, in this song from the musical Sweeney Todd, the first phrase (“I feel, you, Johanna, I feel you”) is primarily disjunct, while the second phrase, beginning with the text “I was half convinced I’d waken” is much more conjunct, until the word “mistaken”, which takes you back to “Johanna” and the original melody of disjunct motion.
Melodic contour: the shape of the melody. Where does the melody go up and where does it go down? how far up and for how long? how far down, and for how long? are the ups and down motions smooth or abrupt?
This melody – “Twinkly Twinkle” begins with the contour moving up, and then it immediately moves back down again. This happens twice. Then the tune jumps up and the following melody moves down (we hear this twice). Then we hear the first melodic contour again, the one that first goes up, then down.
In some melodies, the notes are distinct and separate (as in the twinkle example above), but in many styles of music, notes are approached and left indirectly, or altered, ornamented, or bent. For example, a singer or other instrument might slide up to a note, or hold a note just below the intended pitch and only move to the intended pitch at the end of the note; sliding directly from one note to another is called an elision. A singer or other instrument might hit a note, then slide down and back up again before moving on to the next note; this is a bent note. A singer might ignore the ‘correct note’ altogether, and hold a pitch that falls in between two other pitches- for expressive purposes. This is a Blue note, named after the blues – an African-American style of music that uses many of these type of melodic stylings.
When Whitney Houston sings “I will always love you,” she often slides between notes and bends the pitches. As one of the most expressive singers, she frequently approached melody flexibly and improvisationaly, moving from pitch to pitch with slides and bending her notes. listen especially to the opening of “I will always love you,”, where she sings by herself, and you will hear that she almost never just hits a single note- she moves it around.
Melodic Phrase: A phrase is a short, complete sub-unit of a melody. If a melody is like a paragraph, then a phrase is like a sentence: complete in itself but more meaningful with other phrases. In songs that have words, each line of the text or lyrics is set to an individual musical phrase, and normally these phrases are separated by pauses. Think of the song “Happy Birthday” which has four lines of text. Each line of text is set to its own phrase of melody, and combined they create the entire tune, or song. When we sing the song, we usually pause (and sometimes we use that pause to take a breath to keep singing0 between the phrases: “happy birthday to you” (pause) “happy birthday to you” (pause) “happy birthday dear Helen,” (pause) “happy birthday to you!”
Melodic Phrasing: phrasing refers to how the individual phrases work together and compare with each other. Are they all the same length? are they long? are they short? are some longer than others? For example, in “Happy Birthday,” the third phrase is a bit longer than the the others, but the three others are all about the same length, and none of them are very long.
Melodic Range: the range is the distance between the highest and the lowest of the notes, and the overall scope of how high or how low the melody lies. Some tunes have narrow ranges, some tunes have really big ranges and many have a moderate range – not extremely small or extremely big. For example, in Happy Birthday, the second phrase has a slightly bigger ranger than the first phrase because the interval between ‘birthday’ and ‘to you’ is bigger in the second phrase. The third phrase has a larger range that goes higher than the other three phrases, because the word “birthday” is on the highest note of the tune.
Melodic Description: Here is an example of a description of part of a melody. Notice that the contour and range are described in detail through time as the piece moves along. The piece being described is Rag Gaur Sarang from Northern India.
“Rag Gaur Sarang”
In the first melodic section of Rag Gaur Sarang, the range is extremely narrow with only a few notes, and a conjunct character. The contour remains fairly straight throughout the phrase with only a slight downward motion at the end. In the second section, the range opens up slightly to include notes higher in the register, but still remains somewhat narrow and moves in a conjunct motion. The phrase rises up to the highest note in the middle and then moves back down to the end of the phrase. The next phrase of the piece returns to the narrow range of the original tune, again with a very straight contour except for a few deviations up or down, and with a very conjunct character movement. In the final section of the piece, the range opens up to its widest point as it moves higher up in the singer’s register, with an upward contour towards the middle that then returns back down and motion that is less conjunct than in the narrow range sections but still generally moves stepwise.
ELEMENTS OF MUSIC 