Melody

This article is about melody in music. For other senses of this word, see Melody (disambiguation).

A bar from J.S. Bach's "Fugue No.17 in A flat", BWV 862, from Das Wohltemperirte Clavier (Part I), an example of counterpoint. The two voices (melodies) on each staff may be distinguished by the direction of the beams. , , , & separately.

A melody (from Greek μελῳδία - melōidía, "singing, chanting"), also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones which is perceived as a single entity. In its most literal sense, a melody is a combination of pitch and rhythm, while, more figuratively, the term has occasionally been extended to include successions of other musical elements such as tone color. It may be considered the foreground to the background accompaniment. A line or part need not be a foreground melody.

Melodies often consist of one or more musical phrases or motifs, and are usually repeated throughout a song or piece in various forms. Melodies may also be described by their melodic motion or the pitches or the intervals between pitches (predominantly conjunct or disjunct or with further restrictions), pitch range, tension and release, continuity and coherence, cadence, and shape.

Elements

Given the many and varied elements and styles of melody "many extant explanations [of melody] confine us to specific stylistic models, and they are too exclusive." Paul Narveson claimed in 1984 that more than three-quarters of melodic topics had not been explored thoroughly.

The melodies existing in most European music written before the 20th century, and popular music throughout the 20th century, featured "fixed and easily discernible frequency patterns", recurring "events, often periodic, at all structural levels" and "recurrence of durations and patterns of durations".

Melodies in the 20th century "utilized a greater variety of pitch resources than ha[d] been the custom in any other historical period of Western music." While the diatonic scale was still used, the chromatic scale became "widely employed." Composers also allotted a structural role to "the qualitative dimensions" that previously had been "almost exclusively reserved for pitch and rhythm". Kliewer states, "The essential elements of any melody are duration, pitch, and quality (timbre), texture, and loudness. Though the same melody may be recognizable when played with a wide variety of timbres and dynamics, the latter may still be an "element of linear ordering"

Part

A part is the music played by an individual instrument or voice (or group of identical instruments or voices) within a larger work, such as a melody. It also refers to the printed copy of the music for each instrument, as distinct from the score, which holds the music for all instruments in an ensemble. For example in a string ensemble you would have separate parts for Violin 1, Violin 2, Viola and Cello, even though there might be several of each instrument (and therefore several copies of each part).

Parts may be an outer part, the two on the top and bottom, or inner part, those in between. Part-writing is the composition of parts in consideration of harmony and counterpoint. Melody can be distinguished from harmony from the fact that Melody can be described as "Notes Over Time" whereas Harmony can be described as "Notes At One Time".

A part in great Highland Bagpipe music is a musical sentence. Usually each part consists of four phrases, either one or two bars long. Several sentences combine to produce a paragraph or complete work or tune.

In a polyphonic context the term voice is used to denote a single melodic line or textural layer. The term is generic, and is not meant to imply that the line should necessarily be vocal in character, instead referring to instrumentation or simply to register.

Examples

"Pop Goes the Weasel" melody

Different musical styles use melody in different ways. For example:

• Jazz musicians use the term "lead" or "head" to refer to the main melody, which is used as a starting point for improvisation.
• Rock music, melodic music, and other forms of popular music and folk music tend to pick one or two melodies (verse and chorus) and stick with them; much variety may occur in the phrasing and lyrics.
• Indian classical music relies heavily on melody and rhythm, and not so much on harmony, as the music contains no chord changes.
• Balinese gamelan music often uses complicated variations and alterations of a single melody played simultaneously, called heterophony.
• In western classical music, composers often introduce an initial melody, or theme, and then create variations. Classical music often has several melodic layers, called polyphony, such as those in a fugue, a type of counterpoint. Often, melodies are constructed from motifs or short melodic fragments, such as the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Richard Wagner popularized the concept of a leitmotif: a motif or melody associated with a certain idea, person or place.
• While in both most popular music and classical music of the common practice period pitch and duration are of primary importance in melodies, the contemporary music of the 20th and 21st centuries pitch and duration have lessened in importance and quality has gained importance, often primary. Examples include musique concrète, klangfarbenmelodie, Elliott Carter's Eight Etudes and a Fantasy which contains a movement with only one note, the third movement of Ruth Crawford-Seeger's String Quartet 1931 (later re orchestrated as Andante for string orchestra) in which the melody is created from an unchanging set of pitches through "dissonant dynamics" alone, and György Ligeti's Aventures in which recurring phonetics create the linear form.

Melody from Anton Webern's Variations for Orchestra, Op. 30 (pp. 23-24)

See also

• Appropriation (music)
• Counterpoint
• Hocket
• Klangfarbenmelodie
• Line (poetry)
• Melodic patterns
• Musique concrète
• Parsons code, a simple notation used to identify a piece of music through melodic motion—the motion of the pitch up and down.
• Sequence (music)
• Unified field

Further reading

• Apel, Willi. Harvard Dictionary of Music, 2nd ed., p. 517-19.
• Edwards, Arthur C. The Art of Melody, p.xix-xxx.
• Holst, Imogen (1962/2008). Tune, Faber and Faber, London. ISBN 0-571-24198-0.
• Smits van Waesberghe, J. (1955). A Textbook of Melody: A course in functional melodic analysis, American Institute of Musicology.
• Szabolcsi, Bence (1965). A History Of Melody, Barrie and Rockliff, London.

External links

• Carry A Tune Week List of Tunes
• Access to IMSLP 12 collections of 1000 melodies arranged for solo instrument, with melody-specific historical notes