Melody

• 1. Introduction

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  Melody is one of those words everyone uses and almost no one stops to define. It is a linear succession of musical tones that a listener perceives as a single entity. Pitch and rhythm are its literal bones. But the Norwegian composer Marcus Paus described it as something far more alive: "Melody is to music what a scent is to the senses: it jogs our memory. It gives face to form, and identity and character to the process and proceedings."

  Paus went further, arguing that melody "carries and radiates personality with as much clarity and poignancy as harmony and rhythm combined." That is a striking claim for something that can be whistled on the way to the bus stop. But the claim has a long history behind it. Johann Philipp Kirnberger, writing in an earlier century, cut to the chase: "The true goal of music, its proper enterprise, is melody."

  So what exactly is melody? How do its elements work? Why did the twentieth century force composers to rethink everything about it? And what happens when melody sheds pitch entirely and still survives? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. What Melody Is Made Of

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  Kliewer identified the essential elements of any melody as duration, pitch, quality (or timbre), texture, and loudness. That list is broader than most listeners expect. A melody can remain recognizable across a wide variety of timbres and dynamics, yet those same qualities can also act as "an element of linear ordering" in their own right.

  Melodies often consist of one or more musical phrases or motifs, and are usually repeated throughout a composition in various forms. They can be described by their melodic motion, the intervals between pitches (whether predominantly conjunct or disjunct), pitch range, tension and release, continuity, coherence, cadence, and shape. That gives analysts a rich vocabulary. The melody is also defined by what it sits against: it is the foreground to the background accompaniment. A line or part that is not in the foreground is not, in that technical sense, a melody at all.

  Paul Narveson noted in 1984 that more than three-quarters of melodic topics had not been explored thoroughly. The sheer breadth of the concept is part of the problem. As one school of thought has it, "many extant explanations confine us to specific stylistic models, and they are too exclusive." Given the range of definitions in play, Kirnberger's blunt hierarchy is worth keeping in mind: he placed harmony firmly in melody's service, not the other way around.

• 3. Melody Across Traditions

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  Jazz musicians call the main melody the "lead" or "head," treating it as a launching pad for improvisation rather than a fixed destination. Rock and folk traditions tend toward economy, picking one or two melodies and returning to them: verse and chorus, and sometimes a third contrasting section known as a bridge or middle eight.

  Indian classical music places melody and rhythm at the center of the whole enterprise, with harmony largely absent. There are no chord changes to anchor the structure. The melodic line carries everything. Balinese gamelan music takes a different route again, using complicated variations and alterations of a single melody played simultaneously by multiple performers, a practice called heterophony.

  In western classical music, composers often introduce an initial melody or theme and then build variations from it. Classical structures can involve several melodic layers at once, a technique called polyphony; the fugue is one of the clearest examples. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony built its opening movement from a short motif rather than a long singing line. Richard Wagner took that idea further by popularizing the leitmotif: a motif or melody tied to a specific idea, person, or place, recurring across an entire opera to carry meaning.

• 4. The Twentieth Century Breaks the Rules

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  Before the twentieth century, European art music and popular music both relied on "fixed and easily discernible frequency patterns" and recurring events at all structural levels. Duration and pitch were the twin pillars. The twentieth century dismantled that arrangement piece by piece.

  The chromatic scale, once an occasional visitor, became "widely employed." Composers assigned structural roles to tonal color and texture, dimensions that had previously been "almost exclusively reserved for pitch and rhythm." The century, in short, opened melody to a much wider set of resources than any prior historical period of Western music had used.

  Elliott Carter's Eight Etudes and a Fantasy contains a movement built on only one pitch. Ruth Crawford-Seeger's String Quartet 1931, later re-orchestrated as Andante for string orchestra, generates its melody entirely through what she called "dissonant dynamics," with the set of pitches staying constant throughout. In György Ligeti's Aventures, recurring phonetics create the linear form in place of conventional pitch sequences. Musique concrète and klangfarbenmelodie pushed in similar directions. Taken together, these works show how far melody can travel from its starting point while still being recognized as melody.

• 5. Melody's Lasting Argument

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  Kirnberger's declaration that harmony is "subordinate" to melody was never settled by argument; it was tested by centuries of practice. Popular music throughout the twentieth century kept faith with "recurrence of durations and patterns of durations," the same structural habits that governed European music written before 1900.

  Marcus Paus framed melody's role in almost ambassadorial terms: it is "not only a musical subject, but a manifestation of the musically subjective," and it acts as "messenger from the author to the audience." That description fits the leitmotif as Wagner deployed it, and it fits the recurring chorus of a pop song equally well. Crawford-Seeger's Andante for string orchestra, with its melody sculpted from dynamics alone, is the outer edge of that same idea.