Melody

Melody, the organized succession of musical tones of given pitches and durations. Melodies are distinguished from one another by several traits. For example, the opening of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” falls and then rises in pitch (melodic contour), spans the interval of a major third (range), and consists of three tones, each a whole step from the next (scale). For a melody from a culture having no theoretical scales, the scale consists of all the melody's pitches, arranged in order from lowest to highest, or vice versa. The music of Europe, India, and other cultures has theoretical scales; “Mary Had a Little Lamb” fits into the European major scale. The note-to-note movement in the opening phrase is stepwise, or conjunct. The opening of “The Star-Spangled Banner” also falls, then rises, and the song is in the major scale. Its range, however, is an octave and a fifth, and its melodic movement is disjunct; that is, it skips across various scale notes. Rhythm is inseparable from melodic contour and motion. Although the songs “Goodnight My Someone” and “Seventy-six Trombones”—from the musical The Music Man—share the same pitch-to-pitch sequence, they have different rhythms and distinct melodic identities. A melody may be ornamented with turns, trills, glides, and other devices.

Melodies can be built by combining and varying several motives, or short, recognizable groups of notes. Several motives can be combined in a theme, or a longer melodic fragment used as part of a larger composition. Melodies are also commonly built on certain scaffolds. One is mode, which consists at its minimum of a scale and, usually, a prescribed final note. At the other end of the spectrum, it elaborates into a melody type, which also includes characteristic phrases, motives, ending formulas, and so forth. Complex, highly ornamented, unharmonized Islamic and Indian music and medieval Gregorian and Byzantine chants are built on modes.

In European music of about 1600 to 1900, especially in the 19th century, harmony provided the main scaffolding for melody. Successions of chords created a sense of harmonic color and movement; the chords were arranged so that their top notes produced an effective melody. This conception of melody became so pervasive in Western music that even unharmonized melodies were conceived in terms of implied chords. In the 20th century many composers turned to other kinds of melodic framework, notably the twelve-tone system.

See also Music.