Melody: How do you write one? Do you even need one? And will it ever be exhausted?

On 8/31/2020 at 10:43 PM, gmm said:

One the other side of the coin, can random music even be seen as having been "composed"? Can John Cage really be said to have composed "4:33" if it is made up of sounds he didn't write? Or is it merely an artistic statement?

 

I think you'll find cage was illustrating the impossibility of 'silence' while wearing his philosophical hat so to speak. The title is all he composed and is presumably arbitrary. It's a little like his 90 stories titled "Indeterminacy - New aspects of form in instrumental and electronic music" which does have an improvised 'musical' content but...is that relevant?

5 hours ago, Luis Hernández said:

@AngelCityOutlaw

But tonal centre is one thing and harmony is another one. Atonality provides harmony with tension and relief.

 

An interesting idea. Are we trying to equate harmony with concord only?

1 hour ago, Quinn said:

I think you'll find cage was illustrating the impossibility of 'silence' while wearing his philosophical hat so to speak.

So in other words, it's...

On 8/31/2020 at 4:43 PM, gmm said:

...merely an artistic statement...

2 hours ago, Quinn said:

An interesting idea. Are we trying to equate harmony with concord only?

Many people think that atonal means "random", and that's not the case. Atonal music is harmonically organized in tension-relief sequences. A different thing is that many of us begin to write series and rows without having anything in mind.

But it happens the same with many other languages not "classic". Messiaen, Bartok, etc...

12 hours ago, Luis Hernández said:

@AngelCityOutlaw

But tonal centre is one thing and harmony is another one. Atonality provides harmony with tension and relief.

From "thejazzpianosite"

"Atonal chord progressions are really strange and ambiguous. This is because they lack that feeling of harmonic tension and resolution that you get with functional harmony."

In "atonal" progressions you don't get a sense of any harmony being stronger over the others; a hierarchy. 

Though to be fair, atonal harmonic progressions can still sound nice.

But this thread isn't about chord progressions and the statements on melody that were made on the last page were specifically likened to Schoenberg and modern impressionists. 

12 hours ago, AngelCityOutlaw said:

In "atonal" progressions you don't get a sense of any harmony being stronger over the others

I disagree. It's possible that in an environment of free jazz you can "force" a progression to be even. But you can do it also with standard chords: Dm - Fm - Bbm-.. or with similar structures: G7sus - D7sus - Bb7sus... You don't have here tonal center, either.

But if one studies atonality and harmony, there are many levels of tension. And more if you add notes to a chord.

In fact, there are many "rules" in atonal harmony, for example:

• The tritone breaks: if you put a tritone over a pitch that seems a tonal center, it is annihilated
• Chords with many notes are more dissonant in close position
• Chords formed by pitches separated by a tone have neutral tension
• Tension goes down if pitches are separated
• If a chord is formed by two groups of consonant notes, but each group is dissonant, the tension is higher if the groups are together
• Tension is lowered if a mayor chord is put in the bottom
• Etc..... There are MANY resources to control tension - relief in atonality.

2 hours ago, Luis Hernández said:

In fact, there are many "rules" in atonal harmony, for example:

• The tritone breaks: if you put a tritone over a pitch that seems a tonal center, it is annihilated
• Chords with many notes are more dissonant in close position
• Chords formed by pitches separated by a tone have neutral tension
• Tension goes down if pitches are separated
• If a chord is formed by two groups of consonant notes, but each group is dissonant, the tension is higher if the groups are together
• Tension is lowered if a mayor chord is put in the bottom
• Etc..... There are MANY resources to control tension - relief in atonality.

 

 

According to whom?

2 hours ago, Luis Hernández said:

I disagree. It's possible that in an environment of free jazz you can "force" a progression to be even. But you can do it also with standard chords: Dm - Fm - Bbm-.. or with similar structures: G7sus - D7sus - Bb7sus... You don't have here tonal center, either.

But if one studies atonality and harmony, there are many levels of tension. And more if you add notes to a chord.

I suspect it comes down to case-by-case if at all.

I write music that's been called 'atonal'. The nearest I'll agree is that it's "controlled atonality" because it's far from random. I also believe tension-release doesn't have to be only harmony based. It can be temporal, in dynamics, density or any combination of them. What if an allegedly atonal piece passes through patches of what seem like tonality - tonal centres? (Berg was quite good at this.)  What if it's just advanced chromaticism? 

Perhaps the labelling is far too tight. Seems a human trait to support semantic hierarchy that we have to categorise.

For sure, writing an atonal piece that (in my perceptions that's listenable and communicates some kind of impression) is far more tiring and frustrating than a tonal piece. 

The most eye-opening thing my school music teacher said to me was one can always resolve a discord onto another discord.

1 hour ago, Quinn said:

Perhaps the labelling is far too tight. 

As many have said before, "atonal" is not necessarily a very useful term. Saying something is "atonal" is alot like if someone asked you what time it is and you told them "it's not 2:00 pm". You've told me what it ISN'T, but you haven't told me what it IS.

For something to be "atonal", you have to first establish what is meant by "tonal". I think most people more or less generalize tonal to be CPP, whether they understand what that means or not, while at the same time thinking anything that is largely dissonant is "atonal". There is of course much CPP music that is dissonant, and much non-CPP music that is not. Personally, I find it more helpful to specify how atonal music (or any kind of music) is organized harmonically, rather than just say it's "atonal".

27 minutes ago, gmm said:

According to whom?

Persichetti, for example.

but the degrees of dissonance and consonance are evident. It is just a categorization to use.

10 hours ago, Luis Hernández said:

I disagree. It's possible that in an environment of free jazz you can "force" a progression to be even. But you can do it also with standard chords: Dm - Fm - Bbm-.. or with similar structures: G7sus - D7sus - Bb7sus... You don't have here tonal center, either.

But if one studies atonality and harmony, there are many levels of tension. And more if you add notes to a chord.

In fact, there are many "rules" in atonal harmony, for example:

• The tritone breaks: if you put a tritone over a pitch that seems a tonal center, it is annihilated
• Chords with many notes are more dissonant in close position
• Chords formed by pitches separated by a tone have neutral tension
• Tension goes down if pitches are separated
• If a chord is formed by two groups of consonant notes, but each group is dissonant, the tension is higher if the groups are together
• Tension is lowered if a mayor chord is put in the bottom
• Etc..... There are MANY resources to control tension - relief in atonality.

 

 

My post was not about consonance and dissonance within individual chords.

It was about about a sense of resolution within a chord progression, which in atonal music, is not a thing or else it wouldn't be atonal.

In regards to melody writing, with atonalism and serialism being specifically mentioned on the last page: My point is that a system which was quite literally meant to subvert the established traditions that proved their validity in writing not just melody, but indeed music as a whole, isn't a good response to the question of "How do you write a melody"?

It's akin to someone asking "How do you paint a person" and then offering them Picasso instead of Andrey Shishkin. 

6 hours ago, AngelCityOutlaw said:

In regards to melody writing, with atonalism and serialism being specifically mentioned on the last page: My point is that a system which was quite literally meant to subvert the established traditions that proved their validity in writing not just melody, but indeed music as a whole, isn't a good response to the question of "How do you write a melody"?

Sometimes the "atonal" approach to melody writing can be quite useful to someone who has been stuck on established tonal traditions (which can grow stale too).  The "How to" of this kind of melody would be simply to "write a chromatic melody trying with each new note to use a new previously unheard pitch class".  The melody that one would arrive at by writing this way need not be a 12-tone serial row, which only confirms that tonality and atonality is a spectrum with many shades of gray.  Also in serialism in general - what if instead of a 12-tone row one were to use an 11-tone row or a 10-tone row?  Certainly the results would still be on the side of atonality but with more of a sense of tension and resolution since there would be a chance that the next iteration of the row would use the omitted pitch classes hence "resolve" the previous material.  Perhaps the system was meant to subvert the established traditions but what matters here is how one applies it.

14 hours ago, AngelCityOutlaw said:

My post was not about consonance and dissonance within individual chords.

It was about about a sense of resolution within a chord progression, which in atonal music, is not a thing or else it wouldn't be atonal.

In regards to melody writing, with atonalism and serialism being specifically mentioned on the last page: My point is that a system which was quite literally meant to subvert the established traditions that proved their validity in writing not just melody, but indeed music as a whole, isn't a good response to the question of "How do you write a melody"?

Well, many people see atonality, apart from the name itself, as an opposition to tonality.

If. you can leave that behind you notice that atonality has its own harmonic and melodic characteristics. I don't need to think of tonality to listen to atonality or to enjoy (or dislike) it. Melody, harmony and rhythm are different in these "contemporary" systems. Perhaps this takes many time, exercises, writing, etc... There are more evolved systems that take the other concepts as a base, very far from functional harmony (for example tone clock theory). What all have in common is a flow or tension and relief, provided by many elements. Without that, music is a flat line.

I do feel like I have to contest the VSauce video on this subject.  For any given catchy tune there seems to be maybe hundreds or even thousands of counterparts that sound very similar but aren't quite right.  The possibilities seem to be a bit more limited than the VSauce video implies.

EDIT:  Although now that I've re-watched it ... he does talk about this aspect of melody in the video.

My thoughts are:

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1) Melody will never be exhausted

There's an infinite number of possible melodies because:

• There are 12 notes in standard tuning, 24 in Quarter-Tone tuning, some cultures use a more pentatonic tuning, but no matter how many notes there are, there is a finite number of arrangements sans repetitions. However repetitions are extremely common and virtually everywhere, both rearticulations and back and forth motions, Examples of rearticulation: Anything by Beethoven pretty much, Impromptu in Ab Op. 142 No.2 Schubert(both bass and treble rearticulations here), and hundreds more, Examples of back and forth motion: Virtually every piece written between the Renaissance and Stravinsky and even a lot beyond that
• There's more to melody than just note arranging too, even in the least structured melodies, rhythm plays a big role. And there are a lot more note values than most people realize. From Renaissance to Romantic you have these basic note values: 256th, 128th, 64th(I've seen notes that short in Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor for instance, right at the beginning of the Tocatta), 32nd, 16th, 8th, quarter, half, whole, double whole, and Longa(4 whole notes) + most of the possible dotted forms + even more of the triplet forms and so on.
• You can always do an octave transformation of any melody + Inversion, Retrograde, Retrograde Inversion, Augmentation, Diminution, and Stretto
• And lastly, all melodies have structure to some degree. Whether that's just tension and release points or whether it's whole phrase repetitions, there is structure. Whether all of the melody can be boiled down to 1-3 motifs and their transformations or not, there is structure. But structure doesn't limit us to a finite number of melodies

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2) Melody is always there, always, even when it isn't obvious

Even in pieces that are literally just repeated chords(Chopin's C minor Prelude for instance) there is a melody and there always will be. Moonlight Sonata First Movement is another piece that I've heard of being referred to as no melody because there is so much harmony and what melody there is fits right in. So? The sheer abundance of harmony(chords, arpeggios, Alberti Bass, whatever) does not preclude the presence of melody. And both the Moonlight Sonata First Movement and the Chopin C minor Prelude show that a piece made entirely out of harmony still has a melody within the chords. Chordal melody in general is quite common, especially in the Classical and Romantic eras.

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3) How do I write a melody myself?

I generally just improvise the melody on the spot. If there is a countermelody, I do the same for it and then listen. They generally turn out very good, complementing each other, when there are only 2 melodic lines anyway, with 3 it gets exponentially harder to get both independence of lines AND dissonance that isn't out of place, especially when the melodic lines tend to be within an octave of each other, which mine do with 3 lines and even more with 4 lines, have the average max distance of 1 octave between a pair of inner voices or a pair of an outer and inner voice, usually much closer to a third for the inner voice pair.

On 8/30/2020 at 10:52 PM, PaperComposer said:

So how do you come up with a melody?  There is much literature on harmony, counterpoint and orchestration etc. but the craft of writing a good melody is still mostly a mystery (although I'd be very glad to have someone correct me here if I am wrong).  There are of course plenty of Youtube videos about how to write a melody which you are free to share here as well.

Take a walk in the woods and write from the heart. Use your theory knowledge to polish it with craftsmanship. 

Writing a good melody is one thing. Writing a good melody to you is another.

I think it's going to come down to shear time and brute force to

formulate a melody you're content with.

Probably because it's like a writing a song in and of itself.

It may take some time, and then some more time to really get it right.

But I would say don't skimp on it, spend days on it if necessary.

Thinking of the harmonic implications of a melody could also help.