Remember that a motif is not particularly useful unless it is somewhat self-
contained. If you imagine Beethoven’s Fifth without the fourth note, it would
be very weak and we probably wouldn’t be able to remember it very well.
And Beethoven still needed more development around his motif in order to
drive the idea home without driving the listener crazy. The whistling part
from the movie The Good, The Bad, and The Uglyis another good example of
a motif that is complete and sticks in your head as a result.Similarly, a good melodic phrase is one that carves a place easily in a lis-
tener’s memory. If the phrase is too much like another one, it might be as
easily forgotten as if it were too complicated to make sense out of. Walking
the line of originality, accessibility, and familiarity is the trick to writing a last-
ing, memorable musical composition.Of course, it is not uncommon to hear compositions in which a long melody
line seems almost suspended in timelessness, like Pavane for Une Infante
Defunteby Maurice Ravel. In this composition the composer leads the lis-
tener through several different melodic periods that are almost complete
enough and different enough from one another to have been the basis for
three different compositions.It is all about mood, and few things are as tricky as sculpting time into a
sense of temporal stasis where time itself seems to stand still.Building a Melodic Phrase ............................................................................
Let’s step back from motifs for a minute and examine phrases — the most
basic building blocks of melody. How do we turn a couple of bars of melody
into a musical composition? Consider the very simple melody line shown in
Figure 7-3.Now, let’s make the piece longer than the three measures it already is by
employing repetition. Repetitionis just like it sounds — repeating a musical&b 4
4
œ̇ œ# œ œ œ
œ œ w#∑
Figure 7-3:
A very
straight-
forward,
hummable
melody line
can be your
foundation.72 Part II: Melody and Development