Harmony
Melody: Motif, Phrase and Line
A melody is a single line of notes heard as one thing — an order, a shape, a rhythm and an ending — and writing one is a matter of inventing a small figure, giving it a contour, answering each phrase with another, and choosing which of its notes land on the chord underneath.
Intermediate · 6 sections
What Makes a Melody
Play both. They contain exactly the same seven sounds — the same four pitches, the same number of times each. Nothing has been added and nothing taken away. One of them you could hum back after a single hearing; the other you almost certainly could not. Before you read on, play them twice each and work out what the first one has that the second one has not.
| Ingredient | What it is | What the second clip shows happens without it | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pitch order | Which of the available notes comes next, and which one is skipped to get there | The same four pitches in a scrambled order stop being a tune and become a list | |
| Rhythm | How much time each note gets before the next one arrives, and where its attack falls against the beat | Every note the same length reads as an exercise; nothing is emphasised because nothing is longer | |
| Contour | The shape the line draws on the way up and back down | A line that jumps about without rising or falling as a whole gives the ear nothing to remember — which is what the first row’s clip already plays, since with these seven sounds shape and order come apart together | |
| An ending | A last note that is arrived at rather than merely reached, and usually given more time than the notes before it | A line that stops on whatever note it happened to be on sounds interrupted, not finished |
A melody is a succession of single pitches heard as one continuous line — one note at a time, with an order, a rhythm, a rising and falling shape, and a last note that sounds like an arrival rather than a stop. (also called tune, ordinary speech, and most musicians most of the time)
Two things it is easy to confuse it with are worth ruling out at once. A scale is the raw material: the same notes, in order, all the same length, going one way. It has pitch order and nothing else, which is why nobody hums scales. A chord is the same material stacked rather than strung out: is three notes at once, and the first clip above uses three of those same notes one after another. Neither the notes nor the key makes a melody. The arrangement does.
That is what the two clips are for. They are built from one multiset of sounds — two of one pitch, two of another, two of a third and one more — and the only differences between them are order, length and where they stop. One of those differences on its own would not be enough. Give the shuffled version rhythm and it is still shapeless; give the shaped version even note values and it flattens into an exercise. The four ingredients work together or not at all.
The practical consequence is that melody writing is almost never a matter of finding new notes. The notes are given by the key, and the key gives you seven. Everything that makes one tune memorable and the next forgettable happens in the choices the table lists, and those choices are learnable in a way that inspiration is not.
Convention
Splitting a melody into four ingredients is a teaching device rather than a discovery, and the count varies with who is doing the teaching. Some analysts fold contour into pitch order, because the shape is a consequence of the order; others add register, or the metrical position of the accents, as ingredients in their own right. What every version of the list contains is order, duration and an ending.
Tendency
Melodies are short-breathed. What a listener can sing back after one hearing is usually two or four bars long, and longer melodies are almost always built by joining units of that length rather than by writing one unbroken line. That is why the sections after this one are about figures, phrases and pairs of phrases rather than about melodies whole.
Applies to: Western song, folk and classical repertoire, and the popular music descended from them. Plainchant, much Indian classical melody and a good deal of film scoring build long unbroken lines that never divide into even units at all
You already know this
- A scale from Chapter 7 — the notes of a key in order, with no rhythm and no shape — which is the raw material a melody is made from and is not itself one
- Note values from Chapter 3 — halves, quarters, eighths — which is the half of a melody that has nothing to do with pitch at all: on one repeated note, all a value decides is how long that note lasts before the next attack arrives
In real music
- Frère Jacques, Traditional — the opening four notes, before the repeat: three of them step upward and the fourth drops back to where the line began. Sing those same four pitches in a different order and there is nothing left to recognise
- Amazing Grace, Traditional — the pickup note before the first strong beat leaps upward on to it. That one jump, at the very start, is what the tune is identified by; everything after it moves in thirds and steps and never leaps that far again
See also
Choose three notes of a major scale you can play — say the first, third and fifth degrees. Write a four-bar line using only those three pitches, in any order, giving at least two of the notes twice the length of the others and finishing on the note the key is named after. Play it, then play the same pitches again all the same length and in a different order, and say out loud which of the two you could sing back tomorrow.
Check 1
The first clip once more, played on its own. Compare its very last note with its very first.
Contour and Range
Play all three. Each is a short line in the same key, at the same speed, with every note the same length, so rhythm is out of the picture entirely. What is left is the drawing each one makes in the air. One of them goes somewhere and comes back. One of them only ever goes one way. One of them barely goes anywhere at all. Play each twice and trace it with your hand before reading on.
- Range is the distance from the lowest note to the highest
- The first clip runs from up to and back: a range of one Octave. The third clip never gets outside to , which is three semitones — a range narrow enough to sing in your sleep.
- Tessitura is where the line actually lives
- A line can touch a high note once and spend the rest of its life in the middle. Range measures the extremes; tessitura measures the weight. Six of the eight notes of the third clip are the same pitch, , and the other two are its immediate neighbours — a range of a third and a tessitura of a single note.
| Contour | What the line does | Where it is used | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arch | Rises to a high point somewhere near the middle and comes back down — the first clip, which climbs through four moves to its top note and descends through the same four | The default shape of a sung phrase in almost every tradition; it matches the way a breath is spent | |
| Inverted arch | Falls to a low point in the middle and climbs back out of it | Verses that begin high and lift again at the end of the line; the shape of a sigh answered | |
| Ascending | Goes upward overall and stops at or near its highest note | Build-ups, pre-choruses and anything meant to increase tension without a change of harmony | |
| Descending | Goes downward overall — the second clip, eight notes each a scale step below the one before it, top to bottom with no reversal at all | Endings, laments and the release after a peak; the most restful of the five | |
| Static or wavelike | Circles one note, never travelling more than a step or two from it — the third clip, whose eight notes are one pitch and its two neighbours | Chants, rap and recitative, and any verse whose interest is in the words or the rhythm rather than the pitch |
Contour is the shape a melody draws as it rises and falls — the pattern of ups and downs on its own, with the exact sizes of the moves and the exact pitches thrown away. (also called melodic shape, most teaching and songwriting talk, for the same idea)
It is an abstraction, and the abstraction is the point. Two tunes with the same contour feel related even when they share no notes, because the ear tracks direction far more reliably than it tracks interval size. That is why you can recognise a tune whistled out of tune, why a small child singing "Happy Birthday" a third flat is still unmistakably singing it, and why the first thing worth deciding about a new phrase is not which notes but which way.
Range and tessitura are the other half of the picture, and they are different measurements. Range is the distance between the extremes; tessitura is where the line spends its time. A tune with a range of an octave that touches the top note once for a beat is easy to sing; a tune with the same range that sits near the top throughout is exhausting. Singers care about the second measurement far more than the first, and so should anyone writing for them.
Most lines in most repertoire have a range of about an octave and one clear high point. A wider range is not better — the third clip above has a range of three semitones and is perfectly usable — but a line with no high point at all has given up one of the few structural devices a single part has. Where the highest note falls is one of the strongest signals in a melody, which is why so many choruses put theirs on the title word.
Fact
Contour survives transposition, and pitch does not. Move the first clip up a fourth and every pitch in it changes; the drawing on the staff is the same drawing, moved bodily up the page. That is the same property a roman numeral has in harmony — a description of relationships rather than of notes — which is why contour can be compared between tunes in different keys.
Convention
The five names in the table are a convenience and their boundaries are soft. Arch and inverted arch are sometimes called convex and concave; "wave" or "undulating" is often split off from "static"; a line that climbs in stages with small falls between them is usually still called ascending. Nothing analytical depends on the boundaries — the names exist so that two people can describe a shape to each other quickly.
Tendency
A sung phrase arches: it rises early, peaks about two-thirds of the way through and falls to its ending. The usual explanation is breath — a singer has most air at the start of a phrase and least at the end — and the shape turns up so reliably in song that a phrase which does not arch registers as a deliberate effect.
Applies to: sung melody in Western folk, classical and popular repertoire, where it is close to a default. Instrumental writing is under no such constraint, and a great deal of riff-based rock, electronic and minimalist music uses static contours from beginning to end
You already know this
- Compound intervals from Chapter 5 — anything wider than an octave — which is what a line's range becomes the moment it crosses one, and the point at which most singers start asking for a different key
- Smooth voice leading from Chapter 12 — writing in which each part travels to the nearest available note instead of leaping — which is what makes the falling clip here read as one gesture rather than as eight separate events
In real music
- Joy to the World, Traditional — the very first line is a complete scale descending from the top note to the bottom one and nothing else — one unbroken fall, and the plainest descending contour in the repertoire
- Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Harold Arlen — the first two syllables leap an octave, which spends the whole range of the phrase in a single move. Nothing anywhere else in the song is wider, and everything that follows happens inside the octave that one leap opened
See also
Pick eight notes of a scale you can play. Arrange them three times: once so the line climbs to its highest note in the middle and comes back down, once as an unbroken fall from top to bottom, and once so no note is ever more than a step away from the one you started on. Play all three at the same speed and the same note length, then say which of the three you would put under a first verse and why.
Check 1
One more line, in the same key and at the same speed as the three above. Trace it with your hand while it plays, then say which of the five shapes in the table it drew.
Motif and Development
Play all four. Every one of them begins with the same short figure — three quick notes on one pitch and a fourth below them that gets the rest of the bar to itself — and then does something to it. In the first the second statement is identical. In the other three it is not. Play each pair twice and say out loud, in ordinary words, what was done to the figure the second time. The fifth clip is the five bars of the staff below, which is the figure and then the three alterations with no repeat of the figure between them.
| Technique | What is done to the figure | Which clip shows it | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Repetition | Play it again unchanged, same pitches and same rhythm | This row’s clip, and the first clip above: the second statement is note for note the first | |
| Sequence | Play it again starting from a different note, keeping the shape and letting the key supply the exact sizes | This row’s clip, and the second clip above: the whole figure moves up one scale step, so the falling third becomes a falling third from one note higher | |
| Inversion | Turn every move the opposite way, so what fell now rises by the same number of scale steps | This row’s clip, and the third clip above: the drop of a third at the end becomes a rise of a third instead | |
| Retrograde | Play it backwards, last note first | This row’s clip: the figure, then its four notes and four values in the reverse order — the hardest of the seven to hear, and composers use it far more often than listeners notice it | |
| Augmentation | Give every note a longer value, usually double, without changing a pitch | This row’s clip, and the fourth clip above: the second statement occupies two bars where the first occupied one | |
| Diminution | Give every note a shorter value, usually half — augmentation run backwards | This row’s clip states the figure in the long values the fourth clip ends with and then halves them, which is that clip the other way round | |
| Fragmentation | Keep part of the figure and throw the rest away, usually the most distinctive part | This row’s clip: the figure, then its three short notes twice over with the fourth note thrown away |
A motif is the shortest fragment of music that still has an identity of its own — usually three or four notes with a distinctive rhythm — out of which longer passages are built by repeating it and altering it. (also called motive, most North American theory writing, for the same thing; cell, twentieth-century analysis, usually for a figure of only two or three notes)
What makes a fragment a motif rather than a handful of notes is that it survives being changed. The figure in the clips above is three short notes on one pitch and a fourth a third below them that gets the rest of the bar. Move it up a step and you still recognise it. Turn its ending upside down and you still recognise it. Stretch it to twice the length and you still recognise it. The identity lives in the shape and the rhythm, not in the pitches, which is exactly why the operations in the table work at all.
Development is what those operations are called collectively, and it is the answer to the practical question of how a two-bar idea becomes a two-minute piece. You do not write more ideas. You take the one you have and ask what can be done to it: say it again; say it from somewhere else; say it upside down; say it slower; say half of it. Beethoven built the first movement of his fifth symphony out of a four-note figure this way, and the reason the movement hangs together across seven minutes is that almost every bar of it is that figure in one disguise or another.
The rhythm is usually the more durable half. A motif can be moved to completely different pitches and still be recognised; change its rhythm and it is generally gone. If you are stuck for material, the fastest route to something usable is to invent a rhythm first, of three or four notes, and only then decide what the pitches are.
Fact
A sequence inside a key changes the exact intervals and keeps the scale steps. Moving the figure up one degree of C major takes its fall of two scale steps from –, a Minor Third, to –, which is a major third — the same two steps, one semitone wider, because of where the key puts its half steps. Move it up one degree further and to is a major third too; only at down to does the key supply a minor third again. The step count is what a sequence preserves; the quality is whatever the key supplies.
Convention
The vocabulary is a ladder and its rungs are not sharply divided. A motif is the smallest unit; a phrase is a complete musical thought, typically two or four bars; a theme is a whole tune that a movement is built on and may contain several motifs. Writers disagree about where one ends and the next begins, and nothing much depends on the answer — the operations in the table apply at every rung.
Tendency
When a motif is sequenced, the second statement usually moves by one scale step, up or down, rather than by a leap. A chain of three or four such statements in the same direction is one of the most common ways of building tension in tonal music, and the chain almost always breaks before it becomes predictable — typically after the third statement.
Applies to: common-practice classical writing and the film scoring and musical theatre descended from it, where the device is close to a reflex. Riff-based rock and most electronic music develop material by changing the texture and the arrangement around a repeating figure rather than by transforming the figure itself
You already know this
- Inversion from Chapter 5, where one interval was turned upside down by moving its lower note above the upper one. A motif is inverted in a related but different way: every move is turned the opposite way and keeps its size in scale steps, so the fall of a third at the end of the figure comes back as a rise of a third
- The major scale from Chapter 7, whose uneven pattern of whole and half steps is what a sequence moves a figure through — which is why moving a shape up one degree does not always move every note by the same distance
In real music
- Symphony No. 5 in C minor, first movement, Ludwig van Beethoven — the first six seconds: the four-note figure is stated, and then immediately restated one step lower — same rhythm, same shape, different pitches. That second statement is a sequence, and the rest of the movement is the same figure over and over
- In the Hall of the Mountain King, Edvard Grieg — one short figure from the first bar to the last, restated from a new starting note again and again while the speed and the volume climb; almost nothing else is introduced until the final outburst
See also
Invent a figure of three or four notes on your instrument — decide the rhythm first, then the pitches. Play it, then play it again unchanged. Then play it starting one scale step higher, keeping the same shape. Then play it with its one biggest move turned the opposite way. Then play it with every note twice as long. Write down which of the four alterations still sounded like your figure and which one got away from you.
Check 1
The same figure you have been hearing, and then one thing done to it. Which of the techniques in the table was it?
Phrases: Antecedent and Consequent
Play the first one: a stretch of music in two halves, running straight on from one to the other. Now play the second, which is the first half on its own and then nothing. Something is different about how the two clips leave you, and it is not a matter of length — play the second one and then wait five seconds before doing anything else. What is your ear doing during those five seconds?
| Half | Where it ends | The cadence it is normally set over | How it feels |
|---|---|---|---|
| Antecedent (the first) | On a note that is not the home note — in these clips, the second degree of the key, one step above home | A half cadence: the harmony stops on and goes no further | A comma. It has stopped, but nothing has been settled and the ear waits |
| Consequent (the second) | On the home note itself, arrived at by falling one step on to it | An authentic cadence: resolving to | A full stop. The question is answered and the pair is closed |
A phrase is a complete musical thought — the stretch of melody a singer would take in one breath, typically two or four bars long, ending in a way that tells the listener whether more is coming. (also called period, common-practice terminology, for the antecedent and consequent taken together as one unit; question and answer, informal teaching, for the same pair)
Phrases come in pairs far more often than they come singly, and the pair has names. The antecedent is the first, and it ends inconclusively: on a note that is not the tonic, over harmony that has stopped on the dominant rather than resolved. The consequent is the second, and it ends conclusively: on the tonic, over a dominant that has finally given way. Play the two clips at the top of the section back to back and the effect is unmistakable — the first clip closes and the second leaves you hanging, and the only difference between them is that the second one is missing its other half.
The two halves are usually near-identical for most of their length, which is the part beginners find surprising. In the clips above the first bar and the third are the same four notes; the parting of the ways happens in the last beat or two of each half. That is deliberate. Repeating the opening makes the pair sound like one idea stated twice rather than two unrelated ideas, and it concentrates the listener's attention on the one place where something has changed — the ending. A pair built this way is called a parallel period; one whose two halves begin differently is a contrasting period, and it is much less common.
What makes an ending inconclusive is partly the note and partly the harmony, and the two normally agree. A phrase ending on the second degree over a dominant chord is asking a question twice over: the melody has stopped one step short of home, and the chord underneath it contains the leading tone that wants to resolve. Take either half away and the effect weakens but survives — a tune ending on the second degree with no accompaniment at all still sounds unfinished, which is what the second clip above demonstrates.
Convention
The names are borrowed from logic and grammar, where an antecedent is the "if" clause and a consequent the "then" clause, and they entered music theory through nineteenth-century German writing. Jazz and blues teaching describes the same shape as call and response, after the West African practice the tradition descends from, and analyses it the same way: a first statement that is incomplete, and a second that completes it.
Fact
The two halves of the first clip above are note for note identical for their first five notes of seven. Bars one and three are the same four notes — — bar four opens on the same that bar two does, and only after that do they part: bar four differs from bar two in its last two notes alone. Everything a listener hears as the difference between a question and an answer is carried by those last two notes and nothing else — and the two notes the halves end on are a Major Second apart.
Tendency
Phrases come in even numbers of bars, and four is the default: four-bar phrases paired into eight-bar periods, eight-bar periods paired into sixteen-bar sections. The regularity is so ingrained in Western song that a three-bar or five-bar phrase registers as an event, and composers use an odd-length phrase precisely because the ear counts without being asked to.
Applies to: Western folk song, common-practice classical music and essentially all popular song since the nineteenth century. Plainchant, much traditional music outside Europe and a great deal of progressive rock and contemporary classical writing use phrase lengths that follow the words or the material rather than a bar count
You already know this
- The half cadence and the authentic cadence from Chapter 11 — the harmony that stops on the fifth degree and the harmony that resolves from it on to the first — which are what a question phrase and an answer phrase are normally set over
- Bars and downbeats from Chapter 3, which is the unit phrases are counted in: a phrase is two or four of them, and it almost always begins and ends in a fixed place inside the count
In real music
- Ode to Joy, from Symphony No. 9, Ludwig van Beethoven — the theme is four phrases of four bars. Listen to the end of the second phrase and then the end of the fourth: the second stops on a note that leaves the tune open, and the fourth lands on the note the whole theme has been measuring itself against
- Happy Birthday to You, Traditional — the first "to you" and the second: the first hangs in the air and you would not stop there, and the second settles. Both are sung on the same words, and the two notes under them differ — the first pair steps off the home note on to the note a half step below it and leaves it there, and the second falls a step on to the home note and stays
See also
In a key you can play, write a two-bar line that ends on the fifth degree of the scale and stop there. Play it and let the silence sit. Then write a second two-bar line that begins with the same notes as the first and ends on the note the key is named after. Play the pair as one eight-beat idea. Then swap the two endings over and play it again, and say which version you would put at the end of a verse.
Check 1
One line, played once, with nothing after it. Judge only how it leaves you.
Check 2
The same line again, and this time the answering line has begun — you get its first bar and then silence. Predict the last note of that answering line before you choose.
Melodic Tendency
Play the first two. Each is two notes in C major, the first given time to settle before the second arrives. In both cases, before the second note arrives, try to sing what you think is coming — then hear whether you were right. Now play the third: two notes a long way apart, and then five more. Listen to what the line does immediately after that jump, and whether it does anything else at all.
- The seventh degree is a half step from home
- to is a Minor Second, the smallest distance the key contains. Every other degree of a major scale is a whole step from its upper neighbour except the third, whose upper neighbour — the fourth — is only a half step away.
| Degree | In C major | Stable or active | Where it tends to go |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | Stable — the destination | Nowhere. Everything else is measured against it | |
| 2nd | Active | Down a step to the first degree, or up a step to the third | |
| 3rd | Stable | Nowhere, though it is a softer resting place than the first | |
| 4th | Active — strongly | Down a half step to the third degree | |
| 5th | Stable | Nowhere. The firmest resting place after the first | |
| 6th | Active | Down a step to the fifth degree | |
| 7th | Active — most strongly of all | Up a half step to the first degree, which is why it is called the leading tone |
Melodic tendency is the pull a note of a key exerts towards a particular neighbouring note — the sense, before anything has actually happened, that this note is on its way somewhere and that you already know where. (also called tendency tone, most North American theory writing, for a note that has one; active tone, the same idea stated as the opposite of a stable tone)
It is not a property of the note in isolation. played on its own has no tendency at all; played after a key has been established as C major pulls upward hard enough that most listeners will sing the resolution before it arrives, which is what the first clip above invites you to test. The pull comes from the relationship between the note and the tonic, and from nothing else — transpose the whole thing to another key and the same degree pulls the same way.
The degrees divide into two groups and the division is the one the table gives. The first, third and fifth are the notes of the home chord, and a line can stop on any of them: on the first it is completely at rest, on the third or fifth it is at rest but coloured. The second, fourth, sixth and seventh are not in the home chord, and each has a nearest neighbour inside it that it wants to move to. Two of the four pull much harder than the others, because they are only a half step from their destination: the seventh degree rising to the tonic and the fourth degree falling to the third. Those two are what a dominant seventh chord is made of, which is why Chapter 11 gave that chord so much attention.
A second kind of tendency has nothing to do with the key and everything to do with the shape of the line. A wide leap leaves a gap behind it, and the ear expects the gap to be filled: after a jump upward, a line is expected to turn round and walk back down through the notes it skipped. The third clip does exactly this — one leap of a Major Sixth and then five steps in the other direction, ending on the note it began on. The pattern is so common that it has a name, gap fill, and you can hear it in "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" within three seconds of the first note.
Fact
The seventh degree of a major scale is a half step below the tonic, and the fourth degree is a half step above the third. In C major that is to and down to , both a Minor Second. Every other pair of adjacent degrees in the scale is a whole step apart. This is a fact about distances only — what a listener does with those distances is a matter of training and repertoire, not of acoustics.
Tendency
Active degrees resolve to the nearest stable one, and the two that are a half step away resolve most insistently: the seventh rises to the tonic, the fourth falls to the third, the sixth falls to the fifth and the second falls to the first. A line that leaves an active degree unresolved sounds suspended, which is why doing it deliberately is one of the cheapest ways to make an ending feel unfinished.
Applies to: tonal melody in the common-practice and popular repertoire. Modal writing dissolves the effect entirely — the seventh degree of a Mixolydian tune is a whole step below the tonic and pulls nowhere — and blues melody treats the flattened seventh and third as perfectly stable places to stop
Tendency
A large leap is paid back by stepwise motion in the opposite direction. Writers state it as a rule of thumb — leap up, then walk down — and the usual explanation is that the leap leaves a gap in the listener's hearing that the descent fills in. It is a strong statistical regularity rather than a requirement, and a line that leaps twice in the same direction is using the exception on purpose.
Applies to: sung melody in Western folk, classical and popular repertoire, where it was measured and found to hold across large samples. Instrumental writing conceived on a keyboard or a fretboard leaps far more freely, and bebop lines in particular string leaps together in a way no singer would
You already know this
- Scale degrees from Chapter 7 — numbering the notes of a key one to seven regardless of what key it is — which is the only vocabulary in which a tendency can be stated, because the pull belongs to the degree and not to the letter
- The dominant family from Chapter 11, whose whole claim on the ear is that it contains the note a half step under the tonic — the same pull, heard vertically instead of along a line
In real music
- Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Traditional — the second "twinkle" leaps up a fifth, and from the note above it the tune walks all the way back down by step to where it started — a gap opened in one move and closed in five
- Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Harold Arlen — the octave leap on the first two syllables opens the widest gap in the song — wider than the leap in the third clip above — and the notes immediately after it fall back into the middle of that octave rather than staying at the top
See also
In a major key you can play, sound the home chord, then play each of the seven degrees of the scale on its own and stop. On each one, sing the note your voice wants to go to next before playing anything, then check it against the table. Afterwards, play a leap of a sixth upward and improvise four notes after it without thinking; play it a second time and deliberately do the opposite of what you did first. Write out the four notes of the version you keep and mark the degree of the scale each one sits on.
Check 1
The home chord of C major, then one note of the key on its own. Before you answer, sing the note your voice reaches for after it.
Melody over Harmony
Play all three. The same four chords are underneath each one, one to a bar, at the same tempo. One of the three you could imagine somebody singing; one is bare; one never settles anywhere. Play them in order and work out where the middle one sits between the other two.
A chord tone is a note of a melody that also belongs to the chord sounding underneath it at that moment; a non-chord tone is one that does not, and the difference between them is decided by the harmony at that instant rather than by the note itself. (also called harmonic tone, older North American writing, paired with "non-harmonic tone")
This is Chapter 12’s non-chord tone, seen from the other side. There the question was what an inner part does on its way between two chords; here it is what the top line does, and the test is the same one either way — name the chord sounding at that instant and ask whether the note is in it. What changes is that the same pitch changes category from bar to bar: over is a chord tone, the same over is not, and the same over is again. This is why melody writing over a progression cannot be done once and for all — as the chord changes underneath, the notes available to rest on change with it, and a tune that ignores that fact sounds like the third clip above.
The three clips lay out the whole choice. The first is safe and dull, and the reason is structural: a triad hands you three notes with a gap of a third between each, so a line restricted to them has no neighbour to move to and spends its life jumping. The third is unusable for the opposite reason — not that its notes are wrong, but that every one of them is leaning somewhere and not one of them ever arrives. The second is what real melodies are made of: chord tones on the strong beats to give the ear its landings, and whatever the key supplies in between to carry it from one landing to the next.
That is the practical recipe, and it is worth stating plainly because it is most of what melody writing over a loop consists of. Decide the chords. Put a chord tone of each chord on each of its strong beats, choosing the ones that give you the contour you want. Then join them up with the notes of the key, using the catalogue from Chapter 12 — passing tones between chord tones a third apart, neighbour tones where you want to decorate one in place. The tune that comes out will sit on the harmony without being enslaved to it.
Convention
A melody is normally written against the harmony rather than the other way round, but the order is a working habit and not a rule. Songwriters commonly start from a chord loop and find a tune over it; just as commonly a tune arrives first and is harmonised afterwards, which is what a lead sheet with chord symbols above a single staff records. Either way the analysis is the same: at every moment, either the note is in the chord or it is not.
Tendency
Chord tones fall on strong beats and non-chord tones between them. The first beat of a bar and the beat halfway through it carry the notes that belong to the chord; the notes in between are free to be anything the key supplies. Reversing that — putting the non-chord tone on the strong beat and resolving it after — is the appoggiatura, and it is conspicuous precisely because it breaks the default.
Applies to: common-practice classical writing and the popular song descended from it, where the pattern is close to universal. Jazz from bebop onward deliberately places extensions and altered notes on strong beats, and a great deal of modal and blues writing has no strong-beat preference at all
You already know this
- Non-chord tones from Chapter 12 — the passing tone, the neighbour tone, the suspension and the rest — which were catalogued there as things that happen between parts and are used here as the material a tune is joined up with
- The seven diatonic chords from Chapter 11, which is where you look to find out what the chord under a given bar contains, and therefore which notes of the tune are resting and which are passing through
Where this goes
- A verse and a chorus are commonly built over the same loop with different tunes above it, so the choice of which chord tones to land on is one of the things that makes two sections of a song sound different
- Once the tune and the chords are settled, deciding which instrument carries the line and what the others do underneath it is arranging, and it starts from exactly this division of labour
In real music
- Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen — the first verse names its own chords as it goes — "the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift" — and each of those words is sung over the chord it names, so you can hear the tune arriving on the harmony underneath it
- Let It Be, The Beatles — the verse vocal sits on notes the piano chord is already playing and moves between them in short steps; listen to where the voice holds and you are hearing the chord tones picked out one by one
Loop a four-chord progression you can play, four beats to a chord. Write down the three notes of each chord. Now write a tune over the loop that uses nothing but those notes, one on each strong beat, and play it — it will leap. Then play it again, filling the gaps between the leaps with the scale notes in between. Finally play a third version that deliberately lands on a note outside the chord on every strong beat, and say what it costs you.
Check 1
A fourth line over the same four chords, one you have not heard before. Judge the notes above the chords: which of them belonged to the chord sounding under them?
Key Takeaways
- A melody is a line of single pitches with an order, a rhythm, a shape and an ending, and all four have to be present before a series of notes becomes something you can sing back.
- Melody and harmony are the same material arranged differently: struck together the notes are a chord, struck in turn with lengths and a shape they are a tune.
- Contour is the drawing a line makes as it rises and falls, and it survives transposition, tempo and instrumentation, which is why it is the most durable thing about a tune.
- Range is the distance between a line's extremes and tessitura is where it spends its time; singers care far more about the second than the first.
- A motif is the smallest fragment with an identity of its own, and its identity lives in its rhythm and shape rather than in its exact pitches.
- Long music is built by developing a short figure — repeating it, sequencing it, inverting it, lengthening it, shortening it, or keeping only part of it — rather than by inventing more figures.
- Phrases pair up: an antecedent that ends away from the tonic and asks, and a consequent that usually starts the same way and ends on the tonic and answers.
- The first, third and fifth degrees of a major key are stable and the other four lean towards them, with the seventh and the fourth pulling hardest because they are only a half step away.
- A wide leap is normally paid back by stepwise motion in the opposite direction, which is why so many tunes jump once and then walk back down through the gap.
- Writing a tune over a progression means landing chord tones on the strong beats and joining them with the scale notes in between, and which notes count as chord tones changes with every chord.
Last updated September 22, 2026
Questions
- What is a melody in music?
- A melody is a succession of single pitches heard as one line. It needs four things: an order for the notes, a rhythm that gives some of them more length than others, a shape that rises and falls, and a last note that arrives rather than merely stops. Scales and chords have the notes and none of the rest.
- What is melodic contour?
- Contour is the shape a melody draws as it rises and falls, with the exact pitches and interval sizes thrown away. Almost every line is one of five shapes: an arch, an inverted arch, ascending, descending, or static around one note. Contour survives transposition, which is why a tune whistled out of tune is still recognisable.
- What is a motif in music?
- A motif is the shortest fragment that still has an identity of its own, usually three or four notes with a distinctive rhythm. Longer music is built from one by repeating it, restating it from another note, turning it upside down, lengthening or shortening its notes, or keeping only part of it. The rhythm carries most of the identity.
- What is an antecedent and consequent phrase?
- They are the two halves of a paired phrase, often called a period. The antecedent ends inconclusively, on a note that is not the tonic and over harmony stopped on the dominant. The consequent usually begins with the same notes and ends on the tonic, so the pair reads as a question answered.
- Why do some notes sound like they want to move?
- Because they are not in the home chord and sit close to a note that is. In a major key the first, third and fifth degrees are stable; the other four each lean towards the nearest stable one. The seventh and fourth pull hardest, being only a half step from their destinations.
- How do you write a melody over chords?
- Put a note of each chord on that chord's strong beats, choosing the ones that give the contour you want, then join those notes up with the scale notes between them. Chord tones give the ear somewhere to land; the notes between let the line walk instead of leaping from third to third.