Writing a Melody

Start smaller than you think

Ask someone to hum Beethoven’s Fifth and they give you four notes. Ask for Ode to Joy and you get two bars. Memorable melodies are built from a motif — a scrap of two to six notes with a recognisable rhythm — and then that scrap is used: repeated exactly, repeated a step higher or lower (a sequence), turned upside down (inversion), stretched or squeezed in rhythm. The listener hears the motif once and then recognises it every time it returns, which is what makes a tune feel like one thing instead of a string of notes. Composition is less about inventing and more about deciding what to do with what you already have.

Question and answer

Melodies come in phrases, usually four bars long, and phrases come in pairs. The first phrase, the antecedent, ends somewhere open — often on the dominant, or on a scale degree that is not the tonic — so it sounds like a question. The second, the consequent, starts like the first (the motif again!) and ends on the tonic with a cadence: the answer. Twinkle Twinkle is a textbook pair: “Twinkle twinkle little star” lands on the dominant (G); “how I wonder what you are” lands on the tonic (C). Eight bars, one question, one answer, done. That 4 + 4 shape is called a period, and it is the frame nearly every song verse hangs on.

Contour: where the line goes

Draw a melody’s shape and most good ones make an arch: they rise toward a single highest note — the climax, usually about two thirds of the way through — and settle back down. A tune that stays flat is a chant; one with two competing peaks feels undecided. Movement is mostly by step, with an occasional leap for excitement — and a leap likes to be recovered by a step back in the opposite direction, as if the melody had jumped and needed to regain its balance. A sixth up, then steps down: the opening of My Bonnie, and of half the ballads ever written.

Chord tones and the notes between

Over a C chord, the notes C, E and G are chord tones: they sound at rest. D, F, A and B are non-chord tones: they sound like motion. A melody made only of chord tones is an arpeggio — stable but stiff. A melody that uses non-chord tones on the way between chord tones has the flow of speech. The common kinds all have names:

• Passing tone: steps between two chord tones — C, D, E.
• Neighbour tone: steps away and back — E, F, E.
• Suspension: a note held over from the previous chord that then resolves down by step — the sighing sound at the end of a hymn line.
• Anticipation: a chord tone of the next chord arriving a little early.

The rule of thumb: strong beats prefer chord tones, weak beats and off-beats are where the passing and neighbour notes live. Land your motif’s important notes on the chord and let the in-between notes carry you there.

Rhythm is half the melody

Take any tune and play its pitches all as quarter notes: it dies. The long-and-short of the rhythm, the note that arrives just before the beat (syncopation), the rest that lets a phrase breathe — these are as much the melody as the pitches. A motif with a distinctive rhythm survives even when the pitches change; that is why the four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth work on any pitch at all.

The sketchpad below is a two-bar piano roll over two chords. The readouts count your chord tones and non-chord tones, name the contour and count the leaps — write a motif, play it, and read what you wrote.