PART 1: VIDEO INTRO

When my mother was a teenager growing up in Puerto Rico (in the 1920s) she remembers that young boys would stand beneath the window of their girlfriends and serenade them with a guitar and a beautiful melody.  My mom remembers how she actually helped out a young guy who was having some trouble with his sweetheart, by composing a lovely tune for him to sing. The way she tells it, the melody worked its magic, and he was forever in her debt. It may be a romantic notion, but there is power in a good melody.

The ancient Greeks thought that melody acted upon the psyche and could produce noticeable effects.  The proper melody could stir up an army to fight valiantly, while the wrong melody could make them languid and submissive!  Before we snicker at this idea, though, we might first consider how much money is being made now from that same premise.  There are several companies that sell what's called "canned" music, for places like supermarkets, factories, and doctor's offices. They've run tests on hundreds of tunes and assigned numerical values to them based on their psychological impact.  By very carefully compiling 20 minute long "sets" with a specific aim in mind, they find they can subtly influence behavior. Supermarkets like to use relaxing sets to induce people to linger and buy more; fast food restaurants go for the more peppy tunes to keep customers moving right along. It might be a commercial notion, but there is money in a good melody!

So melody is a complex phenomenon and one that is treated differently between cultures, time periods and styles.  To understand melody, then, let's start by breaking it down to its component parts first.

PITCH (in music at least!), refers to the highness or lowness of a sound. A synonym for pitch is note. In a general way we all instinctively recognize pitch differences because they are built right into our anatomy. For instance, we expect the voices of children to be high-pitched; men usually have lower-pitched voices. Psychologists have studied the way babies particularly respond to the more high-pitched voices of their mothers.

Strictly speaking, pitch is a function of frequency. Without getting too technical, sound is produced by small, extremely rapid vibrations that are set off in an instrument - such as a violin, a flute, or a piano- and transmitted through the air. (To understand this relationship between vibration and sound, you can run this quick experiment right now, seated at your computer: put your fingers on your throat--a bit below the Adam's Apple--and just hum. You'll feel the vibration of sound on your throat.) One complete vibration is called a cycle. Now, the human ear has an amazing capacity to pick up anywhere between about 15 cycles per second and 20,000 cycles per second (per second!)

The higher the rate of these cycles (or, as it's often expressed, the higher the frequency of these cycles) the higher the pitch. Just to give you a landmark within the range that we humans hear: 440 cycles per second gives you "concert a"-- the "a" an orchestra tunes to at the beginning of a concert (and also, the "a" above middle c on the piano).

In music pitches are specifically labelled, from the lowest to the highest. When pitches are strung together in some sort of coherent way, they form a MELODY. So we can define a melody as "a coherent succession of pitches."  What makes melodies interesting and memorable is a combination of things: the overall shape- what is sometimes called "line" or "melodic contour;" the rhythm; and the type of movement (i.e., leaping or stepwise). 

What's the difference between a melody and a tune? A tune is a type of melody-- think of it as a more modest version of a melody. Tunes are often simple, catchy melodies, like folksongs. An example would be "Happy Birthday."
	What about the word, "theme?" A theme is usually the subject of a work of music. It can be very short (just a few notes) or quite long, but the piece is usually built around that theme- much the way an essay is built upon a theme or topic.

How does a "theme" differ from a "motive?" A motive is a fragmentary idea. In music motives are used as a kernel from which a larger work is built. One of the most famous motives of all time comes from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony: the da-da-da-da of the opening.

 How do scales work? Think of a scale as the pool of notes that a composer uses to write his or her piece. Most cultures employ a scale as the basis for their music, and there are many varieties of scales to choose from. Scales are one of the ways in which cultures differ quite strongly from one another.  The typical Western scale (the basis of everything from Beethoven to Bruce Springsteen) is a 7 note pattern. Japanese scales have 5  note, while some Arabian scales use 17 notes.  Here are some examples of scales from different cultures- you'll probably recognize the Western ones.

Pentatonic	G Major
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B minor	Whole tone	Chromatic
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People often ask how a composer chooses what scale to use. The answer is that different scales have different sounds and often different associations in the minds of both the composer and the listener.  If this sounds intimidating to you, or you think that you could never distinguish between scales, you've got a pleasant surprise coming, as I'll show you in a moment, because we all have a certain sensitivity toward scales. The variety that scales offer is part of what makes a composer like Debussy sound different from Mozart, for example. Compare these two examples:

Debussy: The Sunken Cathedral	Mozart: Sonata in C Major
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In looking for fresh, new sounds for his music, the French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918) built some of his pieces around the pentatonic scale, giving these works a vaguely mysterious, exotic sound which you probably picked up on in the example above. The Sunken Cathedral describes a mythical cathedral that was submerged in water during high tide. By contrast, Mozart's Sonata employed the basic C Major scale- usually the first scale we are taught when we take music lessons- to express simplicity and clarity.

To use an analogy, then, think of scales as a kind of fabric which is used to make an article of clothing. Some fabrics have associations and lend themselves to certain uses. Given a bolt of burlap you probably wouldn't fashion a wedding gown out of it. Neither would you be likely to use silk brocade to make gardening pants! Scales, in the mind of composers, work much the same way, to suggest broadly the type of musical feeling they wish to create.

Can a scale be a melody?  It can, but that's not its primary purpose.The Christmas Carol, "Joy to the World" starts with a descending scale. The Mozart Sonata quoted above uses scales both ascending and descending. Scales can be melodies but composers tend not to overplay this card because it doesn't make for a very interesting piece. Since scales are usually made up of conjunct motion (meaning that the pitches are next to each other, or stepwise) they don't make the most interesting melodies. The majority of melodies with a strong profile have a mixture of conjunct and disjunct movement. When we speak of 'stepwise' (conjunct) motion we mean that notes are right next to each other. Leaping (or disjunct) is when notes are *not* next to each other. When you run a scale in order, each note is right next to the one preceding it. However, if you were to go from the first note of a scale to the third note, that would be a leap because there is space in between those notes.

Music has organization and logic similar to verbal speech. That's why if you can listen to music with the same sense of anticipation and attentiveness you give to a friend speaking, you'll hear and understand more than you ever did before.  We speak in sentences. We string our sentences together to form whole thoughts, or paragraphs, and in turn we put paragraphs together to form larger thoughts. In music what we call a "phrase" is roughly analogous to the sentence.

A good example of basic phrases is the Happy Birthday Song.

If you just sing the song to yourself you’ll notice the parallel shape of phrases 1 & 2 and the complementary shape of phrase 3. Did you notice how the leap in each of the first three phrases gets bigger?

 Phrase lengths vary- they can be long or short, just the way a sentence can be. In fact, it's been said that phrases often reflect the cycle of human breathing. There must be something to this idea, because throughout music history there's been an overwhelming tendency to make phrases about four bars long, corresponding roughly to a natural cycle of inhaling and exhaling.

 Phrases are also often paired. Sometimes this pairing mimics a "question/answer" format. We call this "antecedent/consequent" phrasing. There's a wonderful sense of balance and satisfaction to this type of phrasing.

Melodies can be balanced by the use of both melodic and rhythmic "parallelism" also. Take the example of our national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner. There are phrases in it that are exactly parallel except for the words ("Oh say, can you see" and "Whose broad stripes and bright stars"). On the other hand, there are phrases that have a parallel rhythm, but different pitches ("Oh say, can you see," and "By the dawn's early light"). There are times when the same phrase is repeated, but slightly lower or higher. This is called a "sequence," as in "And the rockets' red glare" and "The bombs bursting in air."

Finally, a good melody has form- usually a beginning, middle and end. The high point of the melody- the point of greatest excitement- is called the "climax," and the melody usually falls away or winds down from this climax. The end of a melody--called a "cadence" corresponds to the period at the end of a sentence. Again, using the language analogy, there are various ways of ending a thought. We can use a semi-colon or dash to signal the end of one thought, but not the end of the whole idea. A period, by contrast, is final. In music there are "half-cadences" or "semi-cadences" (like a semi-colon) and "full cadences" (like a period.)  In other words, there are cadences with a sense of momentary pausing, and those with a satisfying sense of finality.

For further study in melody and the other elements of music, try: Foundations of Music and Musicianship, by David Damschroder. New York: Schirmer Book, 1992.

 

RHYTHM-

Music plays out across the dimension of time, and rhythm is the word we use to organize this. There are two basic components which a listener should try to apprehend, rhythmically- beat and meter. Beat is the most basic subdivision we hear. It is prominent is some types of music (like Rock, Jazz, and Baroque) and more obscured in others (like Romantic era music, or Indian Raga). Beats are also grouped in larger patterns known as meters.

A basic grouping in twos is known as Duple meter.  Rock music uses almost exclusively duple meter (often with accents on the second and fourth beat), like this:

A grouping in threes is known as Triple meter: 1 2 3 - 1 2 3 - 1 2 3 - etc.  Compound meter splits each of two beats into three sub-beats:

Beat 1	Beat 2
1 2 3	1 2 3

A good example of a song in triple meter is My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean.

The next time you're riding in your car and you've got the radio on, try to figure out what the meter is.  If you're listening to rock, the vast majority of the time the meter will be duple.  If you're listening to classical it could go either way.  If you find it hard to figure out meter, try this little trick: see if you can nod your head up and down to it.  If the music is in duple meter you'll be able to nod your head in time to the music, up and down.  It will feel comfortable, and you'll be able to fall into a nice 'groove' with it.  But if the music is in triple meter and you start nodding your head up and down in time to the music, it will feel off-balance and strange-- sort of like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

If you've ever watched someone conduct (an orchestra, a band, or any other ensemble) you may have picked up on the fact that they often beat time with one hand while using the other hand for giving cues to the musicians.  Conductors often use stock patterns to indicate the meter to their musicians-- you can see these below, and they show clearly the difference between basic duple and triple meter.

Duple meter

Triple meter

You can try these beat patterns yourself when you listen to music, to see if you can figure out the meter.  Don't get hung up on it if at first it's a bit mystifying-- you'll get the hang of it with practice, I guarantee it.

NOTE: In the Test Yourself area of this website you can practice picking out the meter of various pieces- duple, triple, compound, or, in certain old musics, no meter at all!

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