Melody and Harmony
Senior 2 · Music
Melody and Harmony
Lesson 1 of 5
20 min
Think of the last song that stayed in your head on the way home from school. What you remember is almost never the drums or the chords: it is the tune, the line of notes you can hum on your own. That line is the melody. In a choir it is usually sung by the sopranos; in a Rwandan song led by a soloist, it is the line the soloist sings and the group answers.
In this unit you will learn how melody and harmony work together. You start with melody, because every harmony is built to support one. By the end of this lesson you will be able to describe any melody using four ideas: shape, movement, range and phrases.
The German composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) wrote this melody for the last movement of his Ninth Symphony, first performed in 1824. It is out of copyright, and it is one of the best-known tunes in the world. Here are its first four bars in C major, with the letter names and the tonic sol-fa under each note.
Sing it in sol-fa first: m m f s | s f m r | d d r m | m . r r. Now look at what the notes do.
A melody is a series of single notes heard one after another as one musical line. Every melody has two ingredients:
Change either ingredient and you have a different melody. Sing Ode to Joy with every note the same length and it already sounds less like itself.
The contour of a melody is its overall shape: the line you would draw if you joined the note heads. Common shapes are rising, falling, arch (up then down), inverted arch (down then up) and wave (up and down several times).
A melody that moves mostly by step is called conjunct: smooth and easy to sing. A melody with many leaps is disjunct: more dramatic and harder to sing. Ode to Joy is conjunct. Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star starts with a leap: C C G G (d d s s).
The range of a melody is the distance from its lowest note to its highest note. A school song for the whole class should have a small range, about an octave (eight notes) or less, so that every voice can reach it.
A phrase is a musical sentence, often two or four bars long, usually followed by a breath. Many melodies are built in pairs of phrases:
The home note of a key is called the tonic (d in sol-fa). Most melodies end on it. The same idea appears in call and response, common in Rwandan songs: a leader sings a line and the group replies.
A motif is a short group of notes or a rhythm that returns again and again. Repetition makes a melody easy to remember. In Ode to Joy, bars 1 to 4 and bars 5 to 8 begin in exactly the same way; only the ending changes.
Tip
Sing the last note. To test whether a phrase is a question or an answer, sing it in sol-fa and stop on its last note. If you land on d, you feel at rest. If you land on r, s or t, you want to keep going. Exam questions about phrases can nearly always be answered this way.
Name each movement as a step, a skip or a leap: (a) E to F; (b) C to A; (c) G to B.
Solution: (a) step, because F is the next letter after E. (b) leap: C to A covers six letter names (C D E F G A), a sixth. (c) skip: G to B jumps over A, a third.
A melody in sol-fa goes d r m f s f m r d. Describe its contour and its movement.
Solution: it rises from d to s and falls back to d, so the contour is an arch. Every note moves to the next note of the scale, so it is conjunct.
What is the range of the Ode to Joy opening shown above?
Solution: the lowest note is C and the highest is G. Counting C D E F G gives five letter names, so the range is a fifth.
Write an answer phrase, in sol-fa, for the question m m f s | s f m r. Use four crotchets per bar and finish on the home note.
Solution: many answers are correct if they end on d. One is Beethoven's own: m m f s | s f m r | d d r m | r . d d. Another is m m f s | s f m r | m r d r | d d d with the last d held for two beats.
Remember
Sources and credits
The notation drawings, the analysis and the practice were written by Ganzaa.
This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
