Intro
I recently picked up a monophonic synthesizer and have had a lot of fun figuring it out how it works and making all sorts of interesting patches however eventually hit a bit of a roadblock when it came to using these patches to make something more than an arpeggio that actually sounded good!
Plinking away randomly at the keyboard quickly became frustrating so after some digging around online I came across an old book ‘Exercises in Melody Writing’ by Percy Goetschius (link below to archive.org pdf) which looks to be just what I’m after and builds up some foundational rules to apply for writing melodies.
As long as I’m finding the book useful I’ll distill each chapter down into notes and write them up along with any exercises.
What is a Melody
A melody is a series of single tones and may be called ‘good’ when it is properly arranged with regards to the law of natural relation, has a smooth and sensible progression and sufficient rhythm.
Major Scale Steps
Each step in a scale (1,2,3,4,5,6,7 / C,D,E,F,G,A,B) has a particular inclination or direction in which it wishes to resolve, either resting, upwards or downwards.
We can divide the steps into two categories, inactive and active.
Inactive Steps
Inactive or stable steps have no inclination to move and serve as a point of rest in the scale, they can be seen as inert. The 1st, 3rd and 5th scale-steps (C,E,G) make up the inactive steps of the major scales.
Active Steps
The opposite of inactive steps, active steps seek to resolve to a state of rest and consist of the 2nd, 4th, 6th and 7th scale steps (D,F,A,B).
With each inactive step wanting to move towards the inactive tone nearest to it, so we have:
- The 7th scale-step moves upwards, to the 8th scale-step (B -> C)
- The 6th scale-step moves downwards, to the 5th scale-step (A -> G)
- The 4th scale-step moves downwards too, to the 3rd scale-step (F -> E)
- The 2nd scale step sits evenly between the 1st and 3rd so may move either upwards or downwards (D -> C, D -> E)
Repeated Tones
Alongside steps we may also freely repeat tones within the major scale as part of our melodies, (F -> F -> E).
Narrow Leaps
A narrow leap involves a tone jumping past it’s neighbour (D -> F) creating a skip of a third. Similar to repeated tones, narrow leaps are allowed anywhere in a melody.
When leaping from an inactive step there is no obligation to move in a particular direction however if leaping from an active step then it’s preferred to leap in the right direction, i.e. upward from the 7th step and downwards from the 6th or 4th (B -> D)
If a narrow leap is made in the ‘wrong’ direction from an active step it’s best to turn back by either undoing the leap (B -> G -> B) or move to the tone which between the previous and current tone (B -> G -> A)
4-Measure Phrase
The smallest complete musical sentence is known as a Phrase and consists of four measures with each measure consisting of a number of beats as denoted by the time signature.
A melodic phrase should begin with an inactive scale step as the first tone, either in the first (accented) beat of the first measure or one beat earlier as the last beat of a preliminary measure.
The last tone of a phrase should be the tonic, the 1st or 8th scale step. This final tonic should sound on the accented beat of the fourth and final measure.
The tone before the last should be either the 2nd or 7th scale step to ensure the final progression moves to the tonic This kind of ending is known as the Perfect Cadence
Exercise & PDF
To keep things brief I’ll make a separate post for each chapters exercise and my solutions.
A link to a scanned .pdf is also freely available at archive.org, see the following link: https://archive.org/details/exercisesinmelod00goet/