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0:00
- Hi, in this session we're going to be thinking about the whole topic of melody writing. And if you want to take grade six, seven or eight theory, melody writing is very much on the syllabus. If you've never done anything in the way of melody writing before, you might just want to begin by looking back at the grade five lesson that we offered on the subject, just to kind of get up to speed on just how to go about the basic task of melody writing. If you're tackling the theory higher grades,
0:37
this question can come in a number of formats, particularly as you climb through grade seven and eight. But we'll try and talk about general points in this session that are going to help you deal with melody writing, and then maybe get onto some of those specifics of grades a little bit later. And if you're not interested in taking higher grades, but you just want to learn about melody writing, hopefully, there'll be a lot of content in this session that will be useful to you.
1:07
Now I think the first thing to say about this is that when you're faced with something like we've got on the board, which could be the opening of a melody, the temptation is to start writing notes fast and furiously, thinking well, we've got two bars and we've got to create something that's maybe 16 or 20 bars long, so, how can I fill up bars with notes? And that's not really the best way to go about the task. And I'm going to suggest that where you might start
1:38
is to think about the overall structure of the melody that you're writing. What do I mean by this? Well, frequently, music is delivered in phrases of often four bars. It doesn't have to be four bars, it might be eight bars. And you sometimes have what we call irregular phrase structures, where you may have one phrase that contains five bars, followed by another phrase that contains three bars, so it maybe a kind of balance. The five plus three might belong to a sort of eight bar package,
2:14
and so that sometimes works very effectively, but certainly thinking about your music in phrases is going to help you end up with a melody that's going to feel structured, rather than one that just randomly progresses from one note to the next. And before you get into the detail of the phrase structure, you might just want to think about the general structure of the piece. For example, you might be wanting to write a melody or you might be dealing with a question that's asking you
2:46
to write a melody that's in a particular form. Sometimes you'll get a question that says, would you like to write a melody of somewhere between 16 and 20 bars in length, that's the first section of a binary form piece. Well, if something's in binary form, it means it has two sections. We have an A section that will come to a very clear cadence at the end of the A section, usually with a double bar line, sometimes with repeat marks that are repeating the A section, and then we have a B section
3:21
that's based on the same material, but maybe goes off in another direction or two, as well. It will certainly begin and end in the tonic key, but quite often a binary structure piece starts in the tonic key and modulates to the dominant key at the end of the A section, then the B section will begin in the dominant key and will work its way back to the tonic key, possibly going through some other keys on the way. So you may be asked to do something like
3:55
write the first section, the A section of a binary form piece that is going to end by modulating to the dominant key. It doesn't necessarily have to be the dominant key in a binary form piece. For example, you may be in a major key and the end of the A section modulates to the relative minor. Or it may do the opposite, it may be a piece in a minor key that modulates to its relative major, and then works its way back to the tonic minor for the end of the B section.
4:28
So, binary form is a very common structure that you might find, and if you want to find examples of binary form pieces, have a look at the sonatas that Scarlatti wrote for the harpsichord, and you'll find many examples of binary form pieces there. Another possible structure might be what we call ternary form, and ternary form has a structure that goes, A-B-A. In other words, you write your first section, then you have a contrasting B section, often in a different key, and then you return
5:05
to the A section, either as a direct repetition of the first A section, or as some modified variation on it. If it's a modified variation, we often refer to this as A-B-A'. If you see this description, that's ternary form. You see a little dash. It's suggesting that when the A section comes back, it's going to be modified in some way. It may be fairly minor modifications just decorating the melody a little bit more on the original A plan, or it may be restructured in some more substantive way.
5:48
But anyway, those two structures, binary form and ternary form, are often very happy plans for writing a melody. So if you're dealing with a specification that's asking you to do one of those things, well obviously, that's what you have to follow. If you're just able to be free to write a melody in any structure you fancy, then you might think about the binary and ternary formed structure. If you're writing a complete melody, there's a lot to be said for the ternary form structure.
6:21
Apart from anything else, the fact that the A section comes back at the end means that a lot of the work has been done in the original A section, even if you decide to modify it when it comes back. You'd then have to think how the B section was going to contrast, so you certainly want a contrast in key. You want something melodically that belongs to the A sections, but that has a slightly separate distinctive character about it as well. So it doesn't just sound the same as the A sections,
6:54
but it's giving you something that feels like variety, contrast with the A sections. So, certainly starting by thinking about the overall structure. Are we writing ternary form, binary form? You can then go into the detail of, well, if I've got two bars given to me, how's this going to work out? Well, maybe I'm going to start with four bars, and then I'm going to have another four bars. So I've got two phrases that could very comfortably be the end of my A section in binary form.
7:29
I could then have another two phrases of four bars each that would form the B section. Nothing to stop me putting an extra couple of bars on the end of the piece to make a coda, just to round it off. So, you can sort of start with these structures and then think how the phrase structure works inside. So in other words, start with the overall structure, and when you've got that sorted, design the internal structure in such a way that you end up with the right number of bars
8:02
for the piece that you're wanting to write or that you're being asked to write by a particular question. Having done that, you can then plan your keys. So if you're writing a binary form piece, you know that you probably want to modulate to the dominant key or to the relative minor key at the end of the A section, so you can make provision for that just by planning the structure, even if it's just on a separate piece of paper. And then you can start to think about cadences.
8:35
So you probably, at the end of an A section in binary form, want to have a pretty solid cadence. It's going to be possibly a plagal cadence, but perhaps even more readily a perfect cadence in that dominant key, so we really feel as if we've got a strong finish in that new key. When you come to the end of the B section, if you're writing a binary form structure that's complete, you probably want to have a pretty firm cadence that's taking you back to the tonic in the home key.
9:08
So again, a perfect cadence or possibly a plagal cadence. And then you can think for the other cadences about going in a different direction. So for example, if you have a binary plan, the first four bars could end with a perfect or a plagal cadence in the home key, or you could possibly think about writing an imperfect cadence in the home key and then moving on from there to modulate to the dominant key with a firmer perfect cadence at the end of the second phrase.
9:44
Then your third phrase is possibly going to start in that dominant key and work its way back, but maybe there's an opportunity to write, say, an interrupted cadence at the end of that third phase, so by the time we come to the end of the fourth phrase, you're back using a perfect, or a plagal cadence again. So it's just giving us a bit of balance and a bit of structure. The other nice thing is once you've got your cadences planned, is you have a harmonic framework
10:15
in place that at least tells you what's happening at the cadence. So for example, if I took these two bars that are offered on the board, and I was heading for an imperfect cadence by the end of bar four, well, I know that the end of, by the time I get to bar four, I'm going to need chord V. Well, two sharps tells me I'm in the key of D major or B minor. No accidentals in the given tune. I've got an opening that sort of spelling out a tonic chord in D major, so it looks fairly firmly
10:54
as if this piece of music's in D major. So when I come to bar four, if I want an imperfect cadence, I want to finish on a chord V, then chord V in D major will be A, C-sharp, E. So I really want to use notes that belong to that chord. If it's an imperfect cadence, then obviously the chord before that chord V, is going to be a chord I or a chord IV or chord II. So I could decide which of those chords is going to fit best, having maybe just considered
11:32
the implications of chords in the given pair of bars, and then I can plot where that chord is going to be implied in the melody, so that I can pick notes that belong to that, chord I or chord IV or chord II. And then the melody is really going to spell out the cadence, even if you haven't got harmony accompanying your melody, the melody itself will spell out the cadence. So I hope this approach is beginning to make sense, that we start with the overall structure,
12:05
and then we plan the internal structure. When we've got the internal structure in place, we're also planning keys and cadences, so we know where we're going. And in terms of thinking about where those chords might actually come at the cadence points, it's also worth thinking about something that we call harmonic rhythm. What do I mean by this? Well, if you have a given opening, it's worth thinking about how often the chords would change. If this was going to be accompanied with chords,
12:42
how often would the chords change? Well, if I look at the first three notes here, as I said before, those first three notes sort of spell out a chord I in D major, because D major chord I will be D, F-sharp, A. F-sharp, A, D, they all belong to chord I. So that's implying chord I, and if I were accompanying the melody there, I'd want to play a chord I underneath those notes. Now you could look at all these semiquavers that follow and think my goodness, I need a different chord
13:17
for every single semiquaver, but that would be fairly crackers because the chords would be changing so quickly as to not make much sense at all. If this chord I took up the first beat of our 6/8 bar, in other words, it took up the first dotted crotchet beat, it's worth wondering if any of this belongs to say, a second dotted crotchet beat worth of chord. And just looking at that thinking, is there a chord that fits all of those notes? Well, you'd be hard pressed to find a chord
13:51
that fits every single note, but you might to the point of thinking that chord V would work with all of those notes. Let's consider what I mean by that. In the key of D major chord V is A, C-sharp, E. Now, C-sharp therefore belongs to the chord. D is an upper auxiliary note. C-sharp is back with the chord. B would be an unaccented passing note. A belongs to the chord. And the G is either an unaccented passing note or it's the note that turns this chord V into a chord V7, A, C-sharp, E, G.
14:43
So it's possible to see all of those notes in relation to chord V.
14:50
Now, when I come to the next bar, I'm looking at these notes, two F-sharps, the G, the A. That G looks suspiciously like a passing note, doesn't it? Just passing between those two notes. So maybe F-sharp and A are harmony notes. They're the notes that belong to a chord. Now, if I've got F-sharp and A, well F-sharp and A could be the third and the fifth of a chord I. D, F-sharp, A would be chord I in D, So, F-sharp and A could belong to chord I. Or, F-sharp and A could be the root
15:30
and the third of a chord III. So we can either go for I or III. III is a slightly unusual chord. It's not impossible at all. Sometimes it's very effective, but just to be safe, we could think, well, all that belongs to a chord I. Then I've got these two E's at the end of the bar. Well, there are various possibilities that would fit with those E's. I mean, it could be a chord V, couldn't it, because chord V, we've already discovered, in D major comprises the notes A, C-sharp and E.
16:07
It could also be a chord II because E is the root of a chord II. E is also the middle of chord VII, C-sharp, E, G. But we've learned in the past to be careful with chord VII, so it's probably not such a good choice. But you begin to see what this is helping us to do. We're learning something about melody writing, which is that even though we're writing a melody, we're trying to write a melody that implies chords. Unless of course, we're writing a melody
16:43
in a more modern style, and we'll come on to that later. But if you're writing any kind of conventional melody, it really needs to spell out some harmony, so it's good to be aware of what is the harmony that's being spelled out by the given material, if there is any, and also, what's the rate of chord change? In other words, we've got one chord on each dotted crotchet beat, and that's what we call the harmonic rhythm. The harmonic rhythm of this given opening
17:16
is being delivered in dotted crotchet beats, and that's an indication that it's probably something you want to carry on with, which doesn't mean to say that you have to have a new chord on every single beat of the piece. In fact, that might just become a little bit predictable after a while, so there may be moments where you want to change that pattern, particularly when you come to the cadences, you might decide that the last chord of the phrase is going to be two beats of the same chord
17:48
so that the music settles at the cadence point. There might be other points where the harmonic rhythm momentarily wants to go a little bit faster, but it gives you the general plan for the piece. Once you can see that, if you're planning to have an imperfect cadence, for example, at the end of a four bar phrase, well, we've got bars one and two covered, haven't we? Probably in bar four you might think about filling up a whole bar with notes that imply chord V,
18:21
so we've really settled on that imperfect cadence. So chord V is A, C-sharp and E. So if you had a closing bar that went A, C-sharp, E, and then back to A again, that would just spell out those notes, wouldn't it? You could take the same notes in a different order.
18:43
Doesn't really matter, but that might be the closing bar, and in that closing bar, you might have a dotted minim's worth of that chord V, which means that at the end of bar three, you want to have the chord that we want to choose that fits with an imperfect cadence before V. In other words, that's where your I comes, or your II, or your IV. And once you can see that that's going to fill up the second half of bar three, you realise that you only have
19:12
one chord missing to find at the beginning of bar three, so then it's just a question as thinking well, I don't want to repeat this chord or I don't want to have the next chord twice. What else might fit that's going to make this first phase complete? And before you know it, you've got a kind of scheme together for the first phrase. It's much easier in a sense then that once you've got that chord scheme worked out, to find notes that belong to your chosen chords
19:40
and to use a combination of this kind of thing, where we just spelling out notes that belong to the chord, and this kind of thing, where we have a sort of run of more scalic ideas where we're using some inessential notes. Remember, those inessential notes that we talked about in grade five, if you want to go back and remind yourself about those. But we talked about auxiliary notes, where you just go up one and come back. That's upper auxiliary notes. If this had gone C-sharp, B, C-sharp,
20:11
that would have been a lower auxiliary note. We talked about these passing notes, notes that pass by step between harmony notes. Because C-sharp and A belong to chord V, B is an inessential note. It doesn't belong to chord V, it just passes by step between two notes that do belong to chord V. So that's a passing note. Furthermore, it's an unaccented passing note because it comes between this quaver and that quaver. It's just between those two quavers. If it came on the quaver, then you could say
20:49
it's an accented passing note. If it comes on the quaver or comes on a main beat, it's an accented passing note. If it comes between beats, it's an unaccented passing note. There's another unaccented passing note there. So when you come to write your melody, if you're trying to base it on a harmonic scheme, such as the one we've been talking about, you can think about using harmony notes, notes that belong to the chord, and you can think about using these inessential notes as well,
21:23
just to give us a little bit of balance in all of that.
21:29
Now, before you get stuck into writing the notes that belong to whatever chord scheme and cadence scheme you've come up with, it's a very good idea to analyse the given material before you begin. What are the ingredients, if you like, that we've been presented with? And we can do this by thinking about what's happening with the harmony, which we've already done. We can also do in terms of thinking about what's happening with the rhythm, and also, what's happening with the melody.
22:06
So let's just flush out the ideas that we have here, given to us, because those are the ideas that we're going to try and reuse as we go through the piece, and we're also going to think maybe that there'll come a point where we want to have one or two things that slightly contrast with these ideas. So what ideas have we got, what other ideas are left to us? Well, we've got this dotted rhythm. (clapping rhythm) That's quite a distinctive rhythm.
22:34
That'll be rather nice to use somewhere, wouldn't it? The second beat's got a very different kind of rhythm. It's just a continuous run of six semiquavers. (clapping rhythm) So that could be useful figure to have. Then we have another rhythmic idea here. The quaver, two semiquaver, quaver idea, so. (clapping rhythm) There's another idea. You can see later on in the piece, you might decide you want to have a little sequence or something by the time you get to the third phrase,
23:06
and you can have a figure that uses this.
23:15
So you can take a figure like that, melodically and/or rhythmically, and run it into a sequence. So that's another rhythmic idea. And of course, the last rhythmic idea is this crotchet quaver thing. (clapping rhythm) And again, you could use that sequentially.
23:39
So all these things present themselves as melodic or rhythmic ideas that will be used and have potential for sequence. The first thing could be sequential.
23:56
Of course, you could do the same with that as well. So you see there are possibilities for developing the ideas that you've been given. So, I've done this in such a way to make very clear that in this example, there are four quite distinct rhythmic ideas. And really, four quite distinct melodic ideas. This one looks a bit boring, doesn't it? Just a repeated note, but it's amazing that it does have the potential to be used as a little figure that's making a little thing about the repeated note.
24:27
This idea that kind of has an energy about it.
24:36
Has great potential, doesn't it? This rhythmic thing with a dotted figure, the triadic idea, you know, all ideas that can be developed as you go through your piece. So if you take this trouble to do the external plan then do the internal plan of the keys and cadences, and then do some analysis on the given material, you'll be much better equipped to write a melody that's going to make a lot more sense as it unfolds than you would do if you just were panicked into
25:09
starting to write notes that just ramble off in any old direction and won't give you a terribly satisfying melody.
25:18
Now when you've got all that on the go, you then need to think about the detail of writing your melody. And one thing you might want to think about is the balance of conjunct and disjunct movements. Now, let's see what we mean by this. Conjunct means that you're using notes that are next door to each other. So if we look at this second idea in the first bar, that's a good example of a conjunct figure. All those notes are going by step, aren't they?
25:55
So that's a bit of conjunct writing. The first figure is an example of disjunct writing.
26:05
Now, if I write a melody that's entirely disjunct, it's going to feel very fragmented and we're going to get to the point where they're screaming for some neighbouring notes. If, on the other hand, I write a melody that's made up entirely of conjunct movement, that's going to get a bit boring. We're just going to think, well, we're going up one, down one, up one, down one, down one again, and you need to have a balance. If you look at this opening,
26:32
you can see there's already a bit of a balance, isn't there? We've got this quite strong disjunct opening idea that goes into a conjunct idea. There's a repetition of a note there, and then a bit more conjunct movement before we have a leap at the end of bar two. So there's quite a nice balance in that given opening, isn't there, between disjunct and conjunct movement. Now, this might be quite a good moment just to listen to the opening two bars.
27:03
I wanted to start off by being analytical about it, but, of course, we want to take a musical approach to this. We want to get the idea of this melody kind of ticking in our heads, and the sooner you can get to the point where you can look at something on paper and hear what's going on, the better empowered you're going to be to write a melody or to write any kind of music. Even if you can't hear every single note, you might just be able to play around with a melody
27:32
and begin to experience the intervals, and have some idea what the shape of that melody is. You might just be able to think the rhythm or clap it to yourself, just to get the idea of what the ideas are. So we've talked about the chords, we've talked about the rhythmic ingredients, we've talked about the melodic ingredients and we've talked about conjunct and disjunct. This is what it sounds like.
28:06
Now, of course, you may be given a tempo indication, and if that's meant to be vivace, it's going to have a different kind of character than a piece that's marked adagio. Or it may be that you're going to have to select your own tempo, so you might just want to think about the overall mood that's been created by the given opening so that we can sustain that mood. And also that if we decide to write something, say, in ternary form, we can think about how we might get
28:38
some kind of contrasting mood in the B section before we bring this first mood back to life again in the A section at the end.
28:50
It's also a good idea just to think about whether the melody, the melodic opening that you've been given, belongs to a particular style. Is it a Baroque melody or a Classical melody or a Romantic melody or a more modern melody, because you obviously want to make sure that what you write is in keeping with the style of the opening. We don't want two bars in one style and then another 14 bars in a totally different style. So try to have some idea what the style of the opening might be.
29:26
Also, just think about the range of the line in terms of the pitch in relation to which instrument you're being asked to write for. Now, you will need to know something about the ranges of instruments, and we've covered some of this in some of the earlier tutorials, and if you go back to some of the work we did in grade four, you should be able to discover a little bit more about that. But for example, if you're being asked to write for the flute, remember that the flute's lowest note
29:57
is middle C, so you can't go below middle C. If you're being asked to write for the oboe, the lowest note of the oboe is B-flat, one below middle C. If you're writing for the violin, then G below middle C is your lowest note. In terms of the highest notes, well, that slightly depends on the ability of the player, because some players are slightly limited in how far up they can go. Other players can do remarkable things that go higher than you ever imagined
30:26
their instrument would travel, so you can worry less about the upper end of things. Though, if you start to write on lots of ledger lines at the top, just begin to question whether that's a sensible thing to do. But it's usually the bottom notes of instruments that you have to be little bit careful about. You also, of course, have to think about the implications of writing for transposing instruments. And again, if you're unclear about that, back in grade five we said a little bit about
30:57
transposing instruments. But, if for example you're writing for the clarinet, and the clarinet is in the key of B-flat, then of course, the notes that are being sounded will be one tone lower than the written pitch, or to put that round the other way, if you're looking for a particular note, you'll have to write it one tone higher. That has implications for key as well. If a pianist accompanying a clarinet in B-flat is in this key of D major, well the clarinet's in B-flat,
31:37
will have to play in E major to make the pitch right. So, there may be implications for dealing with transposing instruments. And of course, thinking about sensible keys, I mean, you can imagine that a good player could play in any key, but if you suddenly decide that you're going to modulate to some very extreme key that's full of double-sharps and double-flats, you may just begin to question the sense of doing that.
32:06
Anyway, back to writing our melody. We've worked out that we've got all these various ingredients, the harmonic implication, the melodic ideas, the rhythmic ideas, and then having planned our phrases and our keys and our cadences, there comes a point where we need to start writing some notes, so writing notes that belong to those chords, writing a melody that's got some balance between conjunct and disjunct movement, and then writing a melody that has some sense of shape about it.
32:39
Quite often you notice in a phrase that a melody starts here, it goes up in the middle and it comes down again at the end of the phrase, but not all phrases do that. Some phrases start here, they go down and they come up again. Some phrases have a different kind of balance. For example, they might be using quite a lot of disjunct movement in the first part of a phrase, maybe bouncing up and down in arpeggios, and then in the second half of the phrase,
33:09
we've got a lot of scale work, a lot of conjunct movement that would balance with that. So, just thinking about the balance, the shape, the sense of line of a musical phrase is an important thing to consider. Make sure when you come to the end of a phrase, that your melody has some space in which to breathe. Sometimes people write a melody that's maybe 20 bars long, and as you play the melody you start to feel breathless at an early stage, because the melody never stops.
33:45
And don't forget, cadences are often a good stopping places. Now, I'm not suggesting that every time you come to a cadence you just park your melody on some great long note, and then when everybody's forgotten about it, we're start again with the next phrase. You wouldn't want to do that, but it's often the case that when we come to a cadence point, there's a moment at which the music just sits down on a slightly longer note, there's a bit of space
34:12
to breathe, and then we go on to the next phrase. And that also helps us to feel the structure and to feel a balance between one phrase and the next phrase. So just thinking about making sure that the rhythm isn't too busy right at the ends of the phrases, and that there is some potential for the music to breathe. I mean, a wind player would physically need to breathe. So would a singer. But, even a keyboard player would want to lift off the keys
34:46
and to start again, and we need to feel the music breathing. Another thing to consider as well is that you don't have to fill up the entire melody with notes, because rests can also be very effective. Now, there are some melodies, generally speaking, more modern melodies, where rests take on a great significance and sometimes you look at more modern melodies and you think, my goodness, there are as many rests as there are notes, and on occasions even maybe more rests than there are notes.
35:22
If you're writing in that style, that's an important thing to consider. With earlier music, certainly, pre-1900, we're very much likely to have many more notes than there are rests, but the use of occasional rests, actually gives us another possibility to allow the music to breathe and give us a little bit of balance between sound and silence. So, I'm not suggesting that you overuse the rest, but consider the use of rest in certain places, again,
35:54
just to help add variety, help the music to breathe and give us a little bit of silence in the midst of all that sound.
36:05
If you're writing in a more modern piece, well, there are many other things to consider. For example, the time signature might not be constant. You might be asked to write in an irregular time signature and have to deal with that. Or you may find that, actually, it's a piece that lends itself to the time signature being varied, and you could even make moves between regular and irregular time signatures. If you're writing in earlier periods, you'd normally expect the whole piece
36:33
to be in the same time signature. If you're writing in a more modern style, you may find that the given opening, which would be obviously in a different style from this, has other things for you to discover. For example, you might have a given opening that uses a pentatonic scale. You might have a given opening that's written in a whole tone scale. You might have other techniques being used, like you might have a given opening that looks like a note row that belongs to Serialism,
37:09
a particular style that emerged in the 20th century where we tried to give equal rights to all the chromatic notes of the scale. So in other words, you'd take all 12 notes of the scale, one two three four five, six seven eight nine ten, eleven, twelve, and you state each of those notes once before you repeat any of the notes, but you can decide the order of the notes, so that gives you a basic note row. Now you might be given a note row and then be asked to work with that.
37:46
So, obviously, in that case, you're not trying to write something in D major and you're not trying to plan cadences and these rather more conventional things. So in those cases, you need to be a bit freer, but at the same time, you need to try and recognise what the style of the opening is. Is there a particular key? Is there a particular sense of key? Or does it feel as if it's a rather modal melody? A lot of folk melodies are just written in modes. Or have we got these other things,
38:15
as I say, pentatonic scales, whole tone scales, use of Serialism. Other things might jump out of you at the opening material that's given to you. For example, again, if you're in a more modern style, you might see that there are very sudden contrasts. You might see that there are extremes of dynamics or extremely wide intervals, accentuation, particular effects that are being searched for on the instrument in question. Obviously, if you see all of that in the opening,
38:51
that's something that you need to work with as you go through your melody. In other words, whatever the style is, what's the character of the given opening, and how can I actually work with that character in writing a melody? Is there a particular aspect of the given melody that has some kind of prominence? There may be a particular interval where you think, my goodness, there are lots of thirds in the given opening, so that interval of a third is obviously something that's important.
39:25
So start to think about how you could work with thirds and think how you could develop that work with thirds. So you could use the thirds, you could then say well, I'll have a third here, and then I'm going to slightly augment the interval. So, what was the third becomes a fourth, then what's a fourth becomes a fifth. That gives us a sense of development. You could think about inverting the interval. So if we invert a third, it becomes a six. So that would be another way of working with
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that particular interval, but there may be other particular things that have got prominence, a particularly insistent rhythm that seems to be the key thing in the piece, well you need to make sure that even though you're making contrast, that that key thing comes through as your melody unfolds. We talked about motifs and that would work in any particular style.
40:24
The other thing, of course, is that you may be asked to write for voice, and while many of the same things apply, again you need to think about the range of voices, so be careful you don't write something that's too far out of the standard range of voices. So if you think that sopranos can generally get from middle C, certainly up to G, a compound fifth higher. They can usually go a bit higher than that as well, but that's a fairly safe range. The tenors would do the same thing an octave lower.
40:56
And if you're writing for altos and bases, well, you might be looking at G to D, or an octave lower for the bases, G to D, so that we're keeping within a reasonably sensible range, and if you creep slightly outside the top or the bottom, that's not a big problem at all. But if you're consistently outside those ranges, especially as you move further outside of those ranges, then you might be presenting a vocal problem that's difficult to overcome.
41:29
We mentioned as we were talking about setting words in the grades four and five material, about how to deal with putting stresses in the right places. So, if you've got a key word or a key syllable, you'll want to put that on a strong beat. You won't want to put words like "and" or "but" on the first beat of the bar, but you might want to put a word like "love" on a strong beat, because it's obviously a key word in the text. And you also need to think about how many syllables
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there are inside a word. Obviously, a word like "and" or "but" or "love", they're only going to need one note because you've only got one syllable to deal with. Though, of course, it is possible to write several notes on one syllable, so you could have love sung to all these notes.
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♪ Love ♪ That could all roll out on that one syllable. However, if you've got a word that's got more than one syllable, you'll need to make sure you have at least one note for each syllable. "Constantinople" con-stan-ti-no-ple. That's got five syllables. So, you can't just write a minim and write "Constantinople" underneath it. Constantinople is going to need a minimum of five notes. So if you're writing for voices, just think about working with the text a little bit and doing some
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planning work with the text so that you've got the emphasis in the right place, on the right syllables, and you've got enough notes for the number of syllables, and that you've also got a balance in what we call syllabic writing and melismatic writing. Syllabic writing means that you've got a note for each syllable. Melismatic writing is what I've just demonstrated with that word love, when you've got several notes to the same syllable. Quite nice to have a bit of a balance there
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when you're writing with a text.
43:46
So hopefully, that gets us started with how to go about the task of writing a melody. Good luck with that. Think about the techniques that we've thought about, and then try to be as creative as you can in dealing with them. And remember, the most important thing is to end up with something that sounds musical and expressive. Good luck.
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