Music: An Appreciation, 10th Edition (Kamien)

Chapter 5: Melody

Interactive Chapter

ELEMENTS OF MUSIC: MELODY

For many of us, music means melody. We’ve sung in schools, cars, camps, and the shower. After hearing a piece of music, we usually remember its melody best. Familiar melodies have the power to recall past emotions and experiences. Words and instruments aren’t required; we don’t need singers and large orchestras–just a few notes.

Melody is easier to recognize than to define. It must have something special, since melody is common to the music of all times and all peoples, but probably the elusive "something" that evokes so much feeling will never be trapped in a dictionary definition. We do know that a melody is a series of single tones which add up to a recognizable whole. A melody begins, moves, and ends; it has direction, shape, and continuity. The up-and-down movement of its pitches conveys tension and release, expectation and arrival. This is the melodic curve, or line.

A melody moves by small intervals called steps or by larger ones called leaps. A step is the interval between two adjacent tones in the do-re-mi scale (from do to re, re to mi, etc.). Any interval larger than a step is a leap (do to mi, for example). Besides moving up or down by step or leap, a melody may simply repeat the same note. A melody’s range is the distance between its lowest and highest tones. Range may be wide or narrow. Mary Had a Little Lamb moves mostly by step within a narrow range; Rock-a-Bye Baby has a wider range and many leaps as well as steps. Melodies written for instruments tend to have a wider range than those for voices, and they often contain wide leaps and rapid notes that would be difficult to sing.

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