Melody

A melody (from Greek μελῳδία (melōidía) 'singing, chanting'),^[1] also tune, voice or line, is a linear succession of musical tones that the listener perceives as a single entity. In its most literal sense, a melody is a combination of pitch and rhythm, while more figuratively, the term can include other musical elements such as tonal color. It is the foreground to the background accompaniment. A line or part need not be a foreground melody.

This article is about melody in music. For other senses of this word, see Melody (disambiguation).

Melodies often consist of one or more musical phrases or motifs, and are usually repeated throughout a composition in various forms. Melodies may also be described by their melodic motion or the pitches or the intervals between pitches (predominantly conjunct or disjunct or with further restrictions), pitch range, tension and release, continuity and coherence, cadence, and shape.

musicians use the term "lead" or "head" to refer to the main melody, which is used as a starting point for improvisation.

Jazz

and other forms of popular music and folk music tend to pick one or two melodies (verse and chorus, sometimes with a third, contrasting melody known as a bridge or middle eight) and stick with them; much variety may occur in the phrasing and lyrics.

Rock music

relies heavily on melody and rhythm, and not so much on harmony, as the music contains no chord changes.

Indian classical music

gamelan music often uses complicated variations and alterations of a single melody played simultaneously, called heterophony.

Balinese

In western , composers often introduce an initial melody, or theme, and then create variations. Classical music often has several melodic layers, called polyphony, such as those in a fugue, a type of counterpoint. Often, melodies are constructed from motifs or short melodic fragments, such as the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Richard Wagner popularized the concept of a leitmotif: a motif or melody associated with a certain idea, person or place.

classical music

While in both most and classical music of the common practice period pitch and duration are of primary importance in melodies, the contemporary music of the 20th and 21st centuries pitch and duration have lessened in importance and quality has gained importance, often primary. Examples include musique concrète, klangfarbenmelodie, Elliott Carter's Eight Etudes and a Fantasy (which contains a movement with only one note), the third movement of Ruth Crawford-Seeger's String Quartet 1931 (later re-orchestrated as Andante for string orchestra), which creates the melody from an unchanging set of pitches through "dissonant dynamics" alone, and György Ligeti's Aventures, in which recurring phonetics create the linear form.

popular music

Different musical styles use melody in different ways. For example:

Hocket

a simple notation used to identify a piece of music through melodic motion—the motion of the pitch up and down.

Parsons code

Sequence (music)

Unified field

. Harvard Dictionary of Music, 2nd ed., pp. 517–19.

Apel, Willi

Cole, Simon (2020). just BE here – the guide to musicking mindfulness

Edwards, Arthur C. The Art of Melody, pp. xix–xxx.

(1962/2008). Tune, Faber and Faber, London. ISBN 0-571-24198-0.

Holst, Imogen

(1955). A Textbook of Melody: A course in functional melodic analysis, American Institute of Musicology.

Smits van Waesberghe, Joseph

(1965). A History of Melody, Barrie and Rockliff, London.

Szabolcsi, Bence

Trippett, David (2013). Wagner's Melodies. Cambridge University Press.

Trippett, David (2019). "Melody" in The Oxford Handbook to Critical Concepts in Music Theory. Oxford University Press.

The dictionary definition of melody at Wiktionary

Quotations related to Melody at Wikiquote

Carry A Tune Week, list of tunes

Archived 2021-04-28 at the Wayback Machine