Back to Basics - Melody 1
The more advanced things start with an understanding of the fundamentals
Even if many people may know this stuff already. I wanted to document my thoughts on the basics. A place to return to, whenever the other stuff seems too complex and most complex ideas are built from simpler ones.
(Everything that follows is in relationship to western Classical music, Jazz, and the many popular musics of the 20th century and not the theories of other musics from around the world.)
What are the basics?
Music has many fundamental elements. Melody, Harmony, Rhythm and Timbre being some that are often mentioned. Let’s start with melody.
Many melodies are a collection of notes put together, one after the other, and these notes often come from what musicians call scales. A scale being a collection of notes.
Musicians can pick notes from these scales to create melodies or tunes. Of course, there are many things you could discuss when talking about melodies, such as phrasing and articulation, but in essence they are a collection of notes chosen from a scale.
So how does a musician know which ones to choose?
Whichever notes they like…
A musician is free to choose any note they wish. Young students often want to indulge in this freedom. However, very quickly, they realise that they like certain notes more than others, and will end up limiting themselves without pedagogical pressure.
A musician can choose notes from the scale or outside the scale (notes not found in the given scale.) They will notice especially when in combination with harmony (we will address that later) that certain notes sound “better”, more at ease, less harsh or less dissonant as musicians would say.
If we look at a piano, we can see that it has 12 notes. That’s it. You might say, “I’ve seen a piano, and there are plenty more than 12!” And that is technically true, (normally 88 to be precise) however those 88 notes are made up of repetitions of the same 12 notes. Over and over again.
The English alphabet may have 26, but the musical alphabet only has 7. A B C D E F G. That’s all. They can be found on the white notes of a piano. And then there are the black notes, which musicians call sharps/flats. The black notes have two names, their sharp name and their flat name. Sometimes the white notes can be called sharps and flats too! But that’s for another time.
So here are all 12;
A A#/Bb B C C#/Db D D#/Eb E F F#/Gb G G#/Ab
Some of you may have noticed that two of the letters do not have a sharp/flat version of them (we will get to that later). This is a collection of notes or a scale. This one is called the Chromatic Scale. Although this scale is used, many students start with another called ‘The Major Scale’, made famous to the general public through the music of the film, ‘The Sound of Music’. There are 12 major scales, one for each starting note given in the scale above. However, most students start with a particular major scale, the ‘C Major Scale’. This scale looks like this;
C D E F G A B
Here is a great melody using this scale ‘Playing Love’ by Ennio Morricone.
Okay, so it leaves the scale a few times, but not much and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to share that piece.
Next time, I’ll go into detail about why people tend to favour certain notes over others.
Warm Regards