A melody (),[.] also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of that the listener perceives as a single entity. In its most literal sense, a melody is a combination of pitch and rhythm, while more figuratively, the term can include other musical elements such as Timbre. It is 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 composition 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.
Function and elements
Johann Philipp Kirnberger argued:
The Norwegian composer Marcus Paus has argued:
Given the many and varied elements and styles of melody "many extant explanations of confine us to specific stylistic models, and they are too exclusive."[Narveson, Paul (1984). Theory of Melody. .]
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 Melodic pattern", 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 had been the custom in any other historical period of Western culture Classical music." While the diatonic scale was still used, the chromatic scale became "widely employed."[Kliewer, Vernon (1975). "Melody: Linear Aspects of Twentieth-Century Music", Aspects of Twentieth-Century Music, pp. 270–301. Wittlich, Gary (ed.). Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. .] 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.
Examples
Different
use melody in different ways. For example:
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Jazz musicians use the term "lead" or "head" to refer to the main melody, which is used as a starting point for improvisation.
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Rock music, and other forms of popular music and folk music tend to pick one or two melodies (verse and refrain, sometimes with a third, contrasting melody known as a bridge or middle eight) and stick with them; much variety may occur in the phrasing and lyrics.
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Indian classical music relies heavily on melody and rhythm, and not so much on harmony, as the music contains no chord changes.
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gamelan music often uses complicated variations and alterations of a single melody played simultaneously, called heterophony.
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In western classical music, 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.
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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 orchestration as Andante for string orchestra), which creates the melody from an unchanging set of pitches through "dissonant dynamics" alone, and György Ligeti's Aventures, in which recurring phonetics create the linear form.
See also
Further reading
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Willi Apel. Harvard Dictionary of Music, 2nd ed., pp. 517–19.
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Cole, Simon (2020). just BE here – the guide to musicking mindfulness
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Edwards, Arthur C. The Art of Melody, pp. xix–xxx.
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Imogen Holst(1962/2008). Tune, Faber and Faber, London. .
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(1955). A Textbook of Melody: A course in functional melodic analysis, American Institute of Musicology.
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Bence Szabolcsi (1965). A History of Melody, Barrie and Rockliff, London.
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Trippett, David (2013). Wagner's Melodies. Cambridge University Press.
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Trippett, David (2019). "Melody" in The Oxford Handbook to Critical Concepts in Music Theory. Oxford University Press.
External links
