Alright, so, so far we've talked about the beat,
we've talked about rhythm, we've talked about meter.
In this segment, we're going to look at pitches
and melody which is really the most interesting part of the music for...
for the average listener at any rate. So we've had our beat, we've got the rythm, we've
got all the things that are going sort of horizontally
for us. Now we need to look at some sounds that go up and down
because that's what makes a melody. So what is the melody?
The melody is what you would normally call the tune. So when you're listening
to your favorite song on the radio and you're singing along,
that's the melody. But a lot of the music you'll listen to
for this class doesn't have any words so you have to be able to pick out the
melody out of
all the things that might be happening. So that means you need to really
understand the construction of the melody so you know what to listen for.
Let's start with pitch because we really haven't talked about that yet. We've just
had sort of one note sounds and now we're going to get some variety.
So we're here with our beautiful Steinway piano which has 88 keys.
So we think, hmmm, do we really have to know 88 notes?
No! Musicians are sort of lazy in some respects. We
like to keep things as simple as possible for ourselves, so we really only
have seven
letter names. We start at A, we go to G.
And then once you get to G, we're back at A again.
So we just do ABCDEFG, ABCDEFG, ABCDEFG...
We have a very limited set of letters to choose from.
So that gives us seven pitches to choose from and we call those pitches
if you're a sciencey, geeky kind of person, the technical term for pitch
is frequency. So when we talk about things in terms of Hertz,
it's the same thing as pitch, it's just a more scientifical and precise measurement.
So we try to tune instruments normally to
a Hertz of 440 for this note.
A is 440 Hz, so if you hear that, that's what we're talking about, we're just...
thats the vibration level we want for that pitch. So we have all these pitches.
Go from A to G. That takes care of the white notes.
Now we've got the black notes to deal with. So the black notes have different
names depending on their relationship to
white notes. So let's start with that A that we just had.
You can see there are black notes
above and below this A. So we'll start with the one that's below it.
So we have A. We have the note
that's just below it. We call the notes relationship to each other so we have
the note we started with; the one that's just below it
is considered to be the flat of that note. And if you think about your car having a
flat tire it's going to sink down, it's going to be lower
that'll help. So A, the note below it, A flat.
We go the opposite direction - we go up from A,
from A to the next note,
that's right next to it; that's called a sharp.
And if you sit on a tack that's sharp you'll jump up and so you'll be higher and that'll
help you remember that as well.
So we have A, A-flat, A-sharp.
But let's look at this A-flat note again. It's also
the note above G. So we have A,
A-flat, here's G. So, if we start thinking about this note in terms of its
relationship to G...
it gets a new name. It's now above G so it's called G sharp if you're coming at it
from that direction.
A-flat from this direction. Sounds exactly the same. Why would we care?
It has to do with keys and scales and sorts of things like that that
we'll talk about in another segment.
So for now just know that everything has more than one note.
I'm gonna give you a reference for a website called the virtual keyboard
which is really cool
because you'll be able to take the things I talk about here, go to that keyboard - it's got
the names of the notes
on it, and I'll give you some patterns that you can work with so you can do
your own scales and chords so you'll get a chance to sort of fiddle with that
yourself and see how those things work together.
Alright so now we've got our pitches and
as I say we have lots of them on here but we're gonna stay on limited range today.
So we're going to take those pitches, add them to rhythm
and create a melody, something that
we could theoretically sing. Not all melodies are particularly singable.
If we get to the to the Modern Period we'll see that a melody might be
(playing notes)
You're not going to sing that!
You won't even recognize that as being a melody but that would've been the
composer's intent.
But for the most part melodies have some characteristics that...
that help us to know that it's a melody. The first thing a melody has that you
need to know about
is movement, and we've talked about movement in the segment when we were talking about
concert programs and what you might see and that a movement was a segment of a...
a section of a piece. When we talk about movement with regard to melody
we're talking about the way the notes move. And there are only three things
that can happen. One is the easiest. It's just that the note never changes.
(playing same note)
That's just a
lot of repeated notes. That's one thing you can do. Another thing that a melody
can do
is move by steps. So going from one note to its neighbor
on the keyboard. It's nice to use the keyboard for this because you can
actually see the relationships.
(playing notes)
Starts out with steps.
(playing notes)
half steps
(more notes)
a little jumping in there
(more notes)
So, they stay close together,
they mostly just move one note at a time. That's stepwise motion.
And the third thing that can happen is that the notes can skip
(playing music)
You can see that those are all over the place, lots of gaps
in between the notes. So we have stay the same,
move by steps, move by skips.
So we have a couple of technical terms that go with that. If we're talking about a melody
that moves mostly by steps we say that that melody is conjunct.
Conjunct - if you remember con means with, together that will help you keep that
straight.
And if it jumps a lot, then we call that
disjunct. So it's dysfunctional sort of you know - all those things have
similar kinds of roots, so
conjunct, by steps - disjunct, by skips!
So that's the first thing. We have movement. The second thing that a melody has
is a range a range. A range is the distance from the lowest note in the melody
to the highest note in the melody. So some melodies have fairly
small ranges.
(plays music)
Children's songs usually have small ranges in them. That's because children's voices can't
sing
very wide notes so that works for them. A lot of popular songs have a
fairly
narrow range. It makes it much more singable for you, the person out in the
audience who's trying to sing along.
So that melody was mostly conjunct
even though we start with a leap, (plays notes) from there on
it's just steps so it's mostly conjunct, fairly narrow range.
Some melodies are a little wider.
(playing music)
That one goes
8 notes, we went from D to D. So that's a little bit wider,
a little bit wider range. Some melodies have a
very wide range. (plays music)
And then we skip to that high part that everybody knows.
a
So we have a distance there from this C
to this G way up here, for the Star Spangled Banner,
and that's what makes it sometimes more challenging to sing.
So we look at the range; narrow, medium,
wide, and remember you're only looking at the melody so when we start adding other
parts to it
don't think, oh well, there's a tuba player down there playing a really low note
so it must have a very wide range.
We're really only interested in the melodic part so
think about that part not anything else that happens out here
in the fringes somewhere. So we're thinking about those elements.
So now we have the way the melody moves, we have a range.
The third thing that a melody has is a shape. So we could actually sort of draw
pictures of our melodies.
(playing music)
If we drew a picture of that, we'd just sort of have
this jump up and then sort of a stair-step that came down.
If we did (plays tune) we did our jingle bells,
it would be more, (drawing)
more dynamic in its movement. If we did the Star Spangled Banner...
(plays music) it would be like (drawing) and we could connect that all with a line.
So most melodies actually are... they're sort of wave-like. By the time you get it all
drawn out, it would be just a line that goes up and down and maybe has some
stretches that are fairly flat.
So movement, range,
and a shape or contour. Those are the three elements of
a melody. So now we know what a melody sort of looks like.
How do we know it's the melody when there's so many other things going on?
One is that you should be listening for repetition. A good melody is going to have
enough of a repetition
for you to sort of grab onto that like a hook. Something that gets your
attention
and you can focus on. So we're going to use Jingle Bells for our
example for this. So here's the
verse part of Jingle Bells. (plays music)
See it's very repetitive - we had that da da da da da da da da da
dom. Different pitches so it doesn't get too monotonous,
but is recognizable as being a unit, its cohesive,
and it ends on a pitch that sounds like an ending!
So that's the verse part of it. Think about the chorus now!
(plays music)
It had a lot of rapid repeated notes so we had movement that was much more
static
instead of going (plays music)
up and then back down we had
(plays music) repeated, (more music) and then we went
down and up. So we reversed the pattern. So
its different enough from the first part
to get your attention, and it tells you that this is still melody because it's
got its own
inherent pattern within itself. So when you're listening to melody, you're listening for
repetition and contrast.
If you don't have contrast, you'd be bored out of your mind. Let's take this...
(plays music)
That song acutally goes like that for quite a long time. That's not the melody though
yes,
it's repetitive, but there's no contrast so
that's just what we would call a melodic ostinato, a pattern that
has melodic kind of characteristics but it's just
repeated and repeated and repeated... its not the thing you're gonna go home
singing probably. So think about contrast, think about repetition.
As you listen to melodies think about how they're moving; are they conjunct, are
they disjunct, do they stay
the same a lot? What kind of range does it have,
and can you sort of visualize a shape for it. So those are our elements of melody.
We're going to start that, put it together with our rhythm which we've had, 'cause we
could have made rhythms out of all those things,
and now let's add some other elements to it.