[Music has several primary characteristics. In a series of blog postings I’m calling “Music in Pieces,” I’m looking at them one at a time from the perspective of my own work. Now that I have a “body of work,” I can speak to how I handle each “piece” generally.]

In the world of popular song, melody is usual the center on which most things pivot. Many music observers feel that writing great melodies is the best sign of a creative musician, since there is a great deal less mathematical (read “technical”) side to writing melodies, as opposed to a song’s harmony and rhythm. (AI might have something to say about that, but I dread the thought!) Great melodies must 1) sound familiar in the abstract, 2) be easily memorable, 3) convey emotion (of the lyrics, if they’re present), and 4) fit the voice or instrument for which it’s written.

In the world of so-called classical music, melody sometimes appears in a form you’d recognize as “melodic,” and sometimes not. …a composition pivots on it, or it doesn’t. Beethoven was faulted for his lack of great melodies — or, more accurately (he did write several good ones), for a lack of interest in “melody” as a focus for a larger work. He preferred small bits to play with. In the classical world, “theme” or “motive” sheds the “whistle a happy tune” implication of the word “melody — a theme has a lot more it needs to accomplish than the above list, since the longer forms of classical music require it to be used in pieces, transformed through variation, and passed to other “voices.” It was Beethoven’s focus on that wider need that made a long melodic line less interest to him. But I digress…back to pop.

To flesh out our list above, a good melody…

1. …uses musical ideas (sequences of notes) that are similar to others a listener might have heard before. “Familiar” generally translates to comfort and pleasure.
2. …has a “hook” — a piece of a melody which is easily recognized and remembered. Good hooks are shared between listeners who associate them with other memories or emotions. (“Hook,” of course, can be something else besides a piece of a melody, but I’ll get to that.)
3. …does the heavy lifting of conveying the mood of the song. In “Whistle a happy tune,” it is deliberately upbeat since it’s supposed to give comfort to someone needing it…
4. …and, in that case, it’s whistle-able — it fits that as the intended “instrument!” In the case of my quote from “The Coast” above, the melody is being played by a trombone, which (in the hands of a good player) can make sense out of the dips and slides (and other silliness) the “melody” intends to portray.

I’ll now discuss how this works for “classical” (long-form) composers, and for me…

1. In the heyday of Western European classical music (16th through 19th Century), “familiarity” was tied to tonality — scales and arpeggios (chord notes played one at a time) associated with a central pitch (key). In the last 120+ years or so, that build-in “familiarity” has gone abstract, just as it did in the visual arts. The goal was, in part, “newness,” but many argue that any hope of “familiarity” had been lost. I won’t chase that argument here. For me, scale and key are needed, but my ear requires a lot of variation to deliver the newness I crave. It’s a delicate balance which I strive to maintain.
2. Classical composers have LOTS of hooks! Often, they’ll take pieces of a theme and use them all over the place — for accompaniment figures, for variations/transformations, for solo lines, etc. The challenge is to find a balance between a recognizable theme and the need for cohesiveness across a lengthy composition through such “hooks” (the word motif is commonly used). In pop music, hooks can actually be almost anything — a sax solo line (think Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street”), an accompaniment figure (Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” might be an example), or even lyrics alone (rap is rife with them). In those cases, the melody isn’t doing the same work as a classical theme usually does, since the hook has a life of its own, almost separate from the melody. Classical is often much more cohesive in its fragmentation, if that makes sense, but the goal is the same — give the listener something small and simple on which they can hang their ear.
3. Mood and emotion are a deeply personal thing for composers, just as they are for listeners. Popular music has a pretty short list of emotional norms (and music that represent them), whereas classical music is self-consciously more complex, attempting to portray a range of emotions beyond joy or sorrow. For my more recent works I’ve aimed the emotional focus of a composition on something non-musical (see “The Great Barrier Reef” or “Ideal’egy” for two) and attempted to leverage musical ideas I think best represent them. Themes are embedded in a larger approach to mood or emotion, for me.
4. Over the entire scope of pop music, the human voice usually carries a melody, since lyrics are rarely absent. With the exception of my choral pieces, I have a lot more choices. There are lots of traditions here which I happily leverage: “The Coast” uses a piccolo to represent a bird in flight, loud percussion for a storm, the trombone for a parade, and fast-moving strings for children at play. Such things are easy and common associations. But, of course, not all classical music is that “programmatic,” so a composer is free to select, and write for, an instrument purely for its possible relationship with a musical idea. (When I studied viola performance, there were works that happily exploited the viola’s sweet but slightly sultry sound in comparison to the much more shimmery violin — in purely musical ways.)

Since a “theme” has a lot more complex presence in a classical work than a pop song’s melody,” the process of developing themes can be less than systematic. I may start with a theme, or I may start with some other musical idea and develop a theme over it. (“Ideal’egy” was written that way — the descending parallel 5ths as a musical idea was the first thing I wrote, then the solo cello line, then the variations of that theme in other instrumental voices followed.)

To return to our whistling, I’m guessing the songwriter in that case had a lyric idea first (it’s right in the song title), then gathered the melody around it, then wrote the rest to support that. In the case of my trombone, the theme it first presents is actually a modified version of another one from the beginning of the piece. It’s then handed off to other brass, then woodwinds, and eventually strings, pretty much intact. In contrast, the thematic content of the next section (the “Beach”) has one primary theme, but a bunch of motifs strewn about the section, all related to the cascading opening in the strings. All of that was developed “on the fly” as I worked on the section, so the melody wasn’t the “pivotal” driver.

I spend a lot of time in my “project pages” talking about themes and motifs. See the links under “Composition!”)