As you can see, your choice of scale can contribute to the mood messages
you are trying to convey in your music.In the examples so far, we’ve stuck to using short phrases of language to make
a point. But there is no reason why you couldn’t apply these ideas to an entire
conversation — perhaps a musical transcription of your tape-recorded bus trip.If you are writing a song, it is essential to be respectful of the way your lyrics
fit rhythmically and melodically with your music, but you don’t have to be a
great lyricist to use a verbal idea as a source for your melodies. Maybe you
will be the only one who knows that your famous composition started out as
“Scrambled eggs, oh, baby how I love your legs” (Paul McCartney’s original
lyrics for “Yesterday”).Finding Melody in the World Around You ...................................................
Just about every composer has found inspiration for a song from walking out-
side and blinking at the world at one point or another. Nature is a great
source of inspiration; city sidewalks and noisy factories are others.
Sometimes it’s just picking up the recurring rhythms of the environment and
building a simple melody on top of that.Other times, it can be as simple as stealing a bird’s song for your melody — or
the quiet humming or muttering of someone walking past you on the street,
or the varying pitches of a concrete saw whining across the street. Some com-
posers even claim that when they see the throat of a newly-opened flower,
they hear singing in their heads. The inspiration for the greatest composi-
tions in the world is all around you. Learning how to turn that inspiration into
actual music is the challenge.Sometimes composing a melody can be like creating a sonic dot-to-dot drawing.
Many composers have attempted to recreate scenery, landscapes, cityscapes,
and the activities of nature and humanity through their compositions, such
as in George Gershwin’s “Grand Canyon Suite.” In fact, some melodies can be
seen as literal landscapes on the musical staff. If you extract the basic melody
from music, connect the notes on the staff, and hold it up in front of you, it
looks like a dot-to-dot drawing of a scene.If a melody is like a sonic painting of a landscape, the melody rises and dips
into hills and valleys, sometimes quickly jumping up cliffs, and then just as
suddenly diving into ravines.Chapter 5: Finding Melodies Where You Least Expect Them 47