Songwriting Strategies by Mark Simos

Author:Mark Simos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berklee Press
Published: 2016-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

As you review various melodies that attract your ear, begin to notice regions that fall back on scalar, arpeggiated, or patterned effects, and more figural regions with potent melodic shapes. The key is to balance a pleasing variety in both direction and intervals of movement, to create distinct melodic figures and “imagery.” As we’ll see later in our exploration of melodic/harmonic connections, melodic figures with irregular contour tend toward more independence of harmonic and rhythmic interpretations.

Exercise 5.3. Write a Melodic “Ridgeline”

Write a four-bar vocal melodic phrase that uses a variety of the types of intervallic motion described on page 100; in particular, avoid extended passages of only scalar or arpeggiated motion (lines and slopes). Analyze your melody in terms of direction and size of motion, and annotate occurrences of the contour types discussed above. Strive for a variety of specific interval sizes and directions used, and to use most of the tones in the diatonic scale or mode of choice. The melody can be in an authentic or plagal range (i.e., with the tonal center toward the bottom or toward the middle of the range). Where scalar, arpeggiated, or sawtooth figures do occur, try disguising them with rhythmic effects, or by staggering or displacing them across metric boundaries such as bar lines. As you work with these melodic design principles, you should feel as if your melody takes on a distinctive shape, like the ridgeline of a hill seen from a distance.

Not every melody satisfying these contour principles needs to sound like a pentatonic bagpipe tune or a Hindemith exercise! You can try sticking to a strict pentatonic scale, but it’s more instructive to integrate a gapped semi-pentatonic feel with other kinds of melodic motion.

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