The Complete Idiot''s Guide to Music Theory

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This gives us the first two measures of the melody:

The first two measures of our first melody.

Let’s elaborate on these notes a bit. If you want to give the melody a little more

of a flow, you can fill in the blanks between these three notes by adding notes in

the step between each pitch. We’ll do this by turning the half notes into quarter

notes, and adding passing tonesbetween the C and the E, and the E and G.

(That means we’ll go from C to D to E, and from E to F to G.)

The result looks like this:

Apassing tone is

a subsidiary tone you have

to pass through to move

from one important note to

another. The passing tone

is not part of the underly-

ing chord structure, but is

often situated between two

of the notes in a triad.

Definition

The first two measures, with passing tones added.

We’re still left with that single whole note sitting there. It’s okay to leave it like

that, but doing so makes this part of our melody sound like nothing more than a

simple major scale—which it actually is! Fortunately, we can choose to add a lit-

tle more interest by using another technique called a neighboring tone, in which

you land on the main note (in this case, the G), slide briefly to an adjacent note,

and then return to rest on the main note (G, again). The result sounds a little

like “doo-de-doo,” which is slightly more interesting than a plain “doo.”

You can place neighboring tones above or below the main tone; for our little

melody, we’ll use the neighboring tone above the G—which happens to be an A.

Keeping the rhythm simple, we’ll now start the second measure with a quarter

note on G; then follow it by a quarter note on A and a half note on G.

The result looks like this:

You create a

neighboring tone by start-

ing on a pitch, moving up

or down by a step (either

half or whole) and then

returning to the original

pitch; the neighboring tone

is the one that “neighbors”

the original note. Like a

passing tone, a neighbor-

ing tone typically is not

one of the three notes in

the underlying chord triad.

Definition

Embellishing the melody with a neighboring tone.

This is a nice little melody—but it’s really only half of a melody. Ending on the

fifth note of the scale, as it does, actually sets up some melodic tension. When

you hear this melody, you want to resolve the tension, and somehow get things

back to where they started—on C.

There’s an easy way to do this, of course. All you have to do is create a sort of mir-

ror image of the first two measures, but with a downward motion from G to C.

The first thing we’ll do is copy the first measure into a new third measure—

except we’ll copy it with the first note starting on G, and with the quarter notes

moving down in a G F E D progression. (Note that this progression puts two of