Err simple question. How do you write music?

[Terry93D]

(02-08-2017, 01:09 AM)bigcat1969 Wrote: How do you write good melodies and chords? What do you do after you have melody and chord to orchestrate? As if you were writing a for idiots book.

I will note here that I have no formal training in music theory.

1. Melody is distinguishable from harmony in that its notes are not equal. From a theoretical standpoint, a purely theoretical standpoint, whether you voice a D major as a standard triad or in any of its two inversions is irrelevant. Of course, acoustically, they have different properties, and inversions are necessary for good voice-leading, etc. Practically speaking, you would not stick a D and voice it in a very low octave as a standard triad or even as an inversion, because it would create a mud. From a pure standpoint of theory, to a certain extent, the position and voicing of a chord is not as important as the chord itself.

Melodic positioning on the other hand is different: D3 is much different from D4. Richard Strauss, in one of his melodies, when the violins were playing, wrote a melody that reached F3, a note violins can not play. But the other instruments play it, the F3 is still heard, but the melody's direction was such that Strauss could not move the note to an octave the violins could play in. 

Bringing this notion back to the first paragraph, let's say the melody starts on D. For the accompanying chord, you could voice it as a standard triad, or one of its inversions. If the voice-leading for the chords to follow is good, the voicing doesn't matter as much from a theoretical standpoint. Of course, acoustically, inversions are different from standard triads; and ultimately, theory must serve the audible sound. Saying that "voicing doesn't matter" is little more then a useful conceit to explain my point, and it should not be taken seriously.

So intervallic structure is important to the melody. Without rhythm, however, your intervals are dead.

2. Melodic liveliness comes out of its rhythms. The notes G-G-G-Eb are meaningless on their own, but if their rhythm is short-short-short-long, it becomes the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Change those notes, move them up or down the octave, make the Eb the Ab above, the rhythm is recognizable, even if the melody changes. Distort the intervallic structure, keep the rhythm, the melody remains recognizable. Distort the rhythmic structure, keep the intervals, the melody gets lost. 

As an exercise, take a melody, and alternate changing the rhythm and the intervals.


Here's the opening of Beethoven's Fifth. Let's change the intervals, but keep the rhythm.


Now we have first four notes* of a much longer melody from the Scherzo of Jan Vaclav Vorisek's symphony. Let's change the rhythm, but keep the intervals.
(*In Vorisek's symphony, the half note was a dotted quarter note.)


So we get this. Finally, once again, let's change the intervals, and keep the rhythm.


And already, we have lost all vestige of Beethoven's Fifth. Four transformations, and we have a new melody. (Well, motif, but whatever.)

3. Having explained the two fundamental elements of melody, there's room for a lot more, which I shall place into a much-abbreviated list of bullets.

• Call/response form, antecedent/consequent form.
  
• Bar structures; an 8-bar melody divisible into four bars each of which may be divisible into two bars themselves. (Lots of fun to be had if you're willing to make that 8-bar structure 5+3 instead of 4+4. Keeps you on your toes. Keeps the listener on their toes.) But don't feel constrained to this: Try a ten-bar melody, an eleven-bar melody.
  
• Form in general, really. I ought to write an article about melody.
  
• Steps and skips: steps being adjacent notes, skips being non-adjacent notes. I personally would divide this up further: a step is adjacent notes (major and minor seconds), a skip for non-adjacent but still close notes (minor thirds through to perfect fifths), and leaps for far notes (augmented fifths and farther).
  
• Melodies needn't be continuous: rests are okay.
  
• Varying phrasing creates interest - I speak of legatos and staccatos.
  
• Out-of-key notes for effect; be that effect joyful, sad, scary, funny. 
  
• Mixing up time signatures can be very interesting, as can triplets.
  

Finally, one more detail. This is something I probably can not explain very well - music theory is already somewhat lacking the realm of melody, and I am no music theorist. But this is one observation I have made:

4. The internal structure of your melody is very important. The first bar or two will determine the rhythms that are available for you to use. I once made an image to demonstrate this to someone on a Discord server I used to frequent, using the melody of "Silence of the Daylight" from Castlevania II.


All the notes in a single color occupy the same rhythmic space that you see in the first bar. These are all excerpted from different parts of the melody. The first bar or two creates the structure that you'll be working in, and breaking that structure can be difficult. What you see here is actually two slightly different structures: bars one and four have an 8d, 8+H+8, 8 structure, while the other bars have the structure the colors indicate, of 8d, 8+H, Q. Mind, "breaking" that structure can be used excellently for effect. But the way the mind builds melodic flow makes those first few bars is crucial. That's not to say it can't be done. But an 8-bar melody breaks down to 4+4 (Antecedent/Consequent, Tonic/Dominant, Call/Response) which can (but not always) break down to 2+2+2+2. Bar 5 of your 8-bar melody being quite rhythmically different from the rest can create a magical effect, or it can be awkward, ugly, and stupid.

Different structures act differently. If it doesn't break down like that, maybe the first bar, or the first three bars, will create your rhythmic structures. Triplets complicate things: Triplet quarter notes (three quarter notes in the space of one half note) can be used for a beautiful, emotional effect, a note that's just a little too short; it can also be "why did they think that was a good idea?" 

A 'B' melody needn't keep to the 'A' melody's structure, not rhythmically and certainly not intervallically.

These structures exist because of repetition. Within my experience, within what I do and what many of us do, repetition of these structures creates unity, it creates cohesiveness, and it therefore creates emotions. Intersplice the opening of Beethoven's Fifth, then a random bar from Vorisek's Symphony's Scherzo, then bar 9 of "Hedwig's Theme," then thirteen seconds of "Eleanor Rigby," then two bars from "Crisis (Collapse of the Capital City)" from Vandal Hearts, then the ending bars of Game of Thrones' "Main Titles," then seven seconds of Wozzeck. Even if you straighten out the tempo, even if it's all for the same instrument, it's still going to sound like chaos: different keys, different octaves, different time signatures. God help you if it's all just sampled from recordings and interspliced like that without any crossfading.

#

I hope this is of some use to you. I expect there is some stuff that is incorrect, some stuff that is poorly labeled, or which has names. The stuff about intervallic and rhythmic structure comes in large part from Ernst Toch's brilliant The Shaping Forces in Music, which speaks both of the equality of notes vertically (harmonically) and the inequality of notes horizontally. Toch can also lay claim to the Strauss example and to the exercise of melodic transformation. Toch, too, used Beethoven's Fifth in this respect, but he took it much further, alternating changing the rhythm and intervals many, many times, many of those changes resulting in other classical melodies by coincidence (yeah, right). Toch also explained that melodic liveliness comes from rhythm and generally explained all that stuff in more detail, with more poetic languages, with more examples.

Maybe I ought just scan the pages.

Only a few additions are mine; the fourth section most specifically, naturally, the fourth section probably has the most stuff that would be incorrect or poorly-labeled.