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Welcome everyone.

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What's in a melody?

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This is one of those questions that first look saying interesting only until you realise that the idea of a melody containing stuff is somewhat preposterous.

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What's in a melody?

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Is one of those questions we probably could react in the same way as we react to some of those children questions or maybe paradoxes, paradoxes that offer us an opportunity to reflect and ponder about things we are used to.

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No in one way.

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And then thanks to them, we might start looking at the same thing from a completely different angle.

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Just before I continue, just a quick note to say that my course on Counterpoint is available. You will find the link in the description if you're a pianist or a student and want to.

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Learn the fundamentals of harmony and how to make music improvising with them. This is a good way to do it, so there is also a coupon code for 30% discount. The coupon is piano.

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For fun, so 30% discount for a course in counterpoint fundamentals. The link is in the description, so let's continue with our topic today.

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Throughout this podcast, I have often referred to.

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Melody as a musical element on its own, something we can point our attention to, separated from the rest of the music. I am assuming this because Melody has a feature, some qualities. There are things that define what.

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Melodies are, and we are going to describe them in detail.

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Before doing that though, it is worth noting that very often the very thing we believe to be the music, the one aspect of a piece that for us carries the whole point of a musical work, is indeed its melody. If we whistle or or hum a tune while.

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Killing time? We don't have doubts that our whistling is referring to that particular piece of music only.

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This is just to say that for a lot of music, the melody is its main feature, the signature the.

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Emotional the intellectual or even spiritual core? Perhaps it's identity.

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This was Ruby, my dear, by Thelonious Monk.

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Such a simple but interesting melody. So what is Melody made of practically?

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Firstly, it is a sequence of single notes or pitches, as opposed to chords or polyphony.

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For this reason, melodies are usually singable, and since they are singable, melodies usually come with words or lyrics.

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The vast majority of melodies remembered by people has lyrics, and so we already see how by virtue of relying on a sequence of single notes and therefore allowing to be sung, melodies enter from a side door into the world of literally works of poetry.

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And storytelling.

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How many songs are just poems in music?

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What do we call a melody with words distinguished from a melody without?

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We usually refer to a tune when notes are combined with lyrics and stick to the term melody when it's only music.

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So we are technically correct by referring to the melody of a tune, meaning the musical characteristics of a song with lyrics.

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However, the distinction between music that has lyrics versus music that doesn't is not so definite. For example, sometimes music carries the meaning of the lyrics beyond the song, meaning after the song is finished.

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And composers rely heavily on this principle. This quality. What do I mean? Say you are a composer.

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And you have to set a musical libretto story that is given to you by a writer, a librettist. Your task is to set the music in a way that advances underlines and expresses in the best possible way the emotional content of the story.

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What the audience hears are lyrics, well combined with music. That's great, and if you are a good composer, the combination of music and words will be so good that listeners won't really be able to hear one without the other any more. In a way, a good musician.

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Finds the perfect match for the words at hand, so that neither will be able to recall the lyrics without its melody.

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Nor will recall the melody without its lyrics.

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Melody and lyrics grow together in perfect balance, intertwined, but think even more than that. Perhaps they grow into an integrated whole.

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It became common practise in the classical music tradition to open an opera with an instrumental overture as Symphonia, where the composer would put together all the main themes of the opera in a stand alone instrumental piece. This will give the composer a chance to introduce the tunes.

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Melodies only.

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Before the story even starts, allowing the audience to familiarise themselves with the emotional content they are about to engage with.

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Later on, when those tunes are sung at some point throughout the opera, the audience would recognise, perhaps mostly unconsciously, the emotional relevance of the moment, simply by responding to a melody they have heard in the opening of a tour.

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This is what I meant earlier when I said that.

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Sometimes music carries the meanings of the lyrics beyond the song. This is just one example among the many we can point to when attempting to describe the relationship between a melody and its lyrics.

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For example, movies have learned a long time ago how to exploit these emotional connections. The melodies written for film by virtue of their.

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Emotional characteristics and because they can be heard in correspondence with the entrance of the protagonist or a side character, or the approaching of a long-awaited event, have the purpose of wave our attention into the course of the events. They can lock us in the story. They can lock us emotionally.

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In the story.

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Composers for film as well as sound engineers have become incredible at this. The term that defines a melody when is explicitly attached to a character's place, an event, or even an emotion. In theatre and cinema is leitmotif.

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What's a leitmotif?

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While motif.

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Is a technical term that defines a melody in terms of its construction, its notes and intervals, articulation and rhythm. Light motif is a particular kind of motive that accompanies an important element of the story.

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Almost a theme that comes back every time the element reappears in the scene, whether a character, an inanimate object or a play.

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The typical example is Star Wars. In the movie, every character has a dedicated light motive. There is a thing for Luke for the Death star, for the Princess, Layla for the force, and so on. In theatre, opera or cinema as.

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The story plays out a battle between good and evil, or a struggle for love, or what have you. If each character has their own theme, we intuitively associate those musical themes with good, evil love, and so.

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As a result, those characters exist on an ulterior dimension, metaphysical one, perhaps added by music, and those themes as well start having their own individual presence and relevance in the story.

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They introduce events and characters we don't see. Think of the theme of jaws.

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Right, you don't need to see the shark to know it's there.

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And when they are really effective, aligned motif grows its significance even outside the story. It emerges and separates itself from the movie or the opera.

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And eventually enters everyday lives. Think of.

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For example, the underlying significance if you were to pick a piece of music with the intent to celebrate someone, a friend or a family member, think of how different it would be. The effect and the overall message if you were to play this.

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Or this?

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The effect obviously will be entirely different. Your intention will be completely different. The people around you will have a reaction and they will automatically infer or understand what is your opinion.

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Or maybe even your relationship with the person that you're trying to.

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Celebrate right. So it's not just that music has a way to communicate what we feel, what we think.

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But it's also the music attaches associates itself with all these other dimension. All these other layer of meaning that we have attached to before, in the case of Star Wars, whether the theme is associated to a good character or a bad character.

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Threatening character.

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Right. It's so interesting. So a mythological saga such as Star Wars becomes relevant because it is built on powerful archetypes.

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And what better the music is there to bring those archetypes out from the specificity of the movie into the broader, more relevant metaphysical dimension where they can keep reenacting the battle of the story.

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If certain stories are relevant or eternal, it is in the end thanks to the music we attach to them.

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Take this other one.

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How many underlying subtle meaning and messages are underneath these melodies? There are no lyrics. Nevertheless, there is so much attached to to it so much we can associate them with.

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So far we talked about melodies that are just musical melodies.

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Linked to tunes, melodies that become light motifs in relationship to a story being told.

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I briefly discussed the term motif as a more technical perspective on melodies, and I also briefly touch upon the word theme. Melodies can become themes, of course, in accordance to the composer's purposes.

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While I'd love to dive in this huge topic, I will take it will take us a long way from our original trajectory, and I will refer then to one of my previous episodes called what is a theme? Where I discussed the subject at lens.

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While melodies are sung with human voices, they are also played by instruments. Guess what is one of the most common instructions given by teachers to music students make your instrument.

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Seeing.

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Interestingly, we rarely hear the opposite that a singer should try singing like a piano or a trumpet.

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Just by this simple example, we can infer how among the reason why we enjoy listening to instrumental music is that instruments map and imitate the human voice.

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When instruments imitate the human voice well, they are capable of adding a whole new dimension of meaning to the pure sound of their new.

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Instruments can in fact, transcend the human voice, their pitch and dynamic range is usually larger than the voice. They are more orderly, meaning instruments can hold the notes steadily with minimum effort. They don't need musical memory meaning.

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We can play the same note on different days and be sure it's the same note. Most people Can't Sing the same note within a few minutes apart, and I am one of them.

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Instruments can render a multitude of voices at once, like the piano or the guitar. Some don't depend on breathing, and those who do like the clarinet or the saxophone, don't ever incur in the risk of.

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Triggering hostility or disagreement with the listener, which as we know happens so often with human voices.

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For the same reason that when we perform an emotionally charged speech, we might accent certain words or syllable, or we might reach a High Peak, or we might speak very fast and rhythmically with assertive tones and long pauses. Then a melody written in the exact same manner.

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Could possibly come to be interpreted as emotionally charged, assertive and personal music.

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In contrast, when we speak softly, slowly, perhaps in a private conversation with our close friend, we might be sharing something personal, important in the same way, a melody by virtue of being slow and soft, might be hinting at private, personal, confidential emotions.

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It is the.

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Job of a musician. In the end, I think.

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To develop this vocabulary, which essentially is a link between the human and the acoustic.

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Leading to fine humanity expressed in sound and perhaps music expressed in the human voice.

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What we do, for example, on a musical score, is to explore the humanity encrypted in the music notation. We ought to do this job fundamentally by a process of trial and error, because notation just presents a vast range of purely practical.

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Instruction. There's nothing poetic in a music score.

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The music academia in Europe and elsewhere tends to focus its attention on the classical Canon for many reasons, among which the idea that if one needs to be trained on developing such vocabulary, A vocabulary that links the human with the acoustic.

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One should start with the clear cut musical ideas or human emotions in the same way one wishing to learn how to draw will start practising with some still image or steady subject or some solid form or neat.

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Shape classical music offers an immense repertoire of music that, while most is.

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Complex instrumentally, it's human content. It's neatly defined.

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In the early Baroque, in fact, we see.

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The emergence of the theory of effects, which is an attempt to collect and categorise emotions and affections, so that each will have its best musical correspondent. This is at once result of the deep interest in human potential we call humanism and.

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The humanist tradition, in line with the rationalist trajectory that led later towards the Enlightenment.

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Are collection and categorizations of emotions to be associated with musical themes, chords or even tonalities might suggest something like a musical encyclopaedia.

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Therefore.

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A classical Sonata movement by Mozart or Hayden would have as its main instruction allegro happy, joyfully inducing the performer not only to aim at inspiring.

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This affection in the listener, but to feel it itself, to feel it themselves as they play.

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The German composer and music theorist Johann Matheson writes about it. He writes in one of his treaties.

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End Quote since for example, Joy is an expansion of our soul.

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Thus it follows reasonably and naturally that.

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I could best express this effect by large and expanded intervals and end of quote.

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He says that large and expanded intervals.

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Expressed at best, the expansion of the soul, which is.

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What he defines as joy so large and expanded intervals. An example could be.

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Could be this?

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This is a Mozart notice.

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There is such a.

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Vast range achieved in just the very first few melodic notes.

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This is more than an octave. If you were to sink it, you will actually reach from a mid range in your in your voice to very high range.

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And in order to do that, you have to very much expand your lungs. There is a point, right?

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There is a sense of opening up and probably a positive and joyfully opening.

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And and then another quote from the same trait is Matheson says quote whereas if one knows that sadness is a contraction of these subtle parts of your body, then it is easy to see that the small and smallest intervals.

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Are the most suitable for this passion.

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End of quote. So he says that the small and smallest intervals like this, this half step or the whole step are easily associated with the contractions of we called it the subtle parts of our.

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Body possibly possibly is referring to the spirit, the soul, and this contraction is what?

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And.

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What it defines as sadness, and so like half steps.

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Right. This very small intervals could be.

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Right, that the little alpha step seems to be imperfect. Line with what it says. Small and small intervals can be associated and express sadness.

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Yeah.

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As listeners then we have the opportunity to infer possibly project our own humanity in the melodies we hear, and as an artist I would say this is what music is for. There are things about our shared humanity that we can't.

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Put in words and that is the music's role.

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So I'm going now to touch on a few melodies and give some words that might suggest further, hopefully richer interpretation of the music. Let's start with another very sad.

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Very sad melody.

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This is from the movie Schindler's List.

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This melody is so particular.

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There are so many large intervals. Let's hit it.

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That's that's already three large intervals.

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Two large intervals.

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Would be very.

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Hard to sing. This is A and then.

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How many skips?

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Is like a slow, slow vortex. It does make me think of a a labyrinth. It seems to just lowly wander.

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In all directions.

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Without peace.

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So interesting.

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It's one might associate all this labyrinthic slow journey to the sorrows of the Jewish population,

its origins.

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Seems to be.

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Lost in Oblivion, it's very hard to find yourself steady in this music. Steady arriving somewhere steady. It's it's all very unsettled.

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Labyrinth, to me is, is the term that best can associate with this melody.

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Labyrinthic sorrows, another one that I thought we could we could look at is.

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From Ravel.

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So it's a very peculiar melody as well.

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You could hear it.

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Emerging out like a surfacing, the very rich piano complement. This is Ondine from Gaspard. The pianist is.

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Ivo Pogorelich and going back to the melody, this this delicate soft notes.

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Are are seems to be part of the ocean of notes. The waves of notes that seems to be seem to be vibrating underneath they they have the the main stage and out of this little musical.

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Noise. It comes out this very soft and delicate melody. In a sense, the simplest association one can make is with siren singing from the depth of the oceans is probably what Ravel had in mind.

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And but the pace, the pauses.

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Such a non.

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Non driving start like a pause.

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Ah.

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Right. It's it seems to be a slow lament rather than an actual.

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Communication our our our communication of feelings and makes me think of a call from the very depth of the ocean which.

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Symbolically are, of course, our unconscious. I can easily see here Ulysses.

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You know, travelling and hearing this beautiful, seductive, but nevertheless very dangerous cold.

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I'm going to continue with another melody. I mean the choice is infinite. I probably probably feel a little bit melancholic these days, so three choices I now realises and now realise that.

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They're all on the melancholic side. This is the windmills of your mind.

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There is a clear, strong sense of circulating cycling melody in a an obsessive manner.

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That is not there is no. Once again, there is no driving trajectory forward in this. It's more of your own train of thought just comes back to the beginning and every time you don't, you don't make.

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Any progress forward you don't progress, you don't achieve anything, you just come back to the same thought. That's why there is something a bit obsessive about it. It hypnotic and obsessive.

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Just a repetition you can hear.

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How it repeats?

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There is there is a slow descending trajectory.

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Kind of. We kind of see or read this.

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This is not going anywhere.

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In a sense, we can think of, I don't know the lyrics of this tune, but.

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I can I suspect that the wind mills of your mind refer to to this circulating to the circular thinking. Some sort of almost schizophrenic way of just just hearing and thinking all the same things.

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Without development.

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It's interesting that this is similar to the melody before. From Schindler's List, there is a labyrinthic nature in here too. But there is a sense of urgency, at least that there wasn't before. Probably certainly is given by the pace is.

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It's more moving, it's more fluent in this song with means of your mind by Michel Legrand, which wasn't in the previous one but also.

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There is a sense there is a more regular shape, let's say a more regular design and organisation of the phrases as if.

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The person who is having all these hypnotic obsessive thoughts, he is very used to it. There seem to be a seems to be a sense of at once urgency and familiarity with it.

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OK, the final example on the thread of labyrinthic melodies.

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How about this one?

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This is also labyrinthic.

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There are these huge lips and huge jumps.

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It's quite difficult to sync.

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And then in the bridge.

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So it's the same technique for writing, meaning a lot of big jumps and.

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Unexpected turns, but there is something so warm and and loving about this melody. It's like someone at every step of the.

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Story at every step of the melody is like seems to be more open and more warm and more expressive.

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The next step?

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The next one.

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And slowly closes back again. It's a it's a very friendly, loving trajectory there. It's it's interesting how the pace, the order and the the rhythm of it does.

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Change completely the atmosphere and the probably the expressive purposes of of a melody too.

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It's hard to see a melody like this not set on love on lyrics that have to do with love. This is more gets in your eyes. Music by Jerome Kern. And I think I think I better stop.

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Otherwise, I'm going to go through the entire repertoire of.

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Melodies that I know and we will finish in the fall, I guess so. Thank you for being with me today today. I hope you enjoyed this episode and let me know what you think in the comments. If you like what they do, please feel free.

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To.

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Like subscribe and maybe leave a comment that is always very helpful. And also if you want to support of course you can do so by becoming a Member, a member of on Patreon. So thank you again for being with me and see you next time.