Music Composition DUMmIES

The first eight notes of this incredibly famous piece are just a descending

major scale — pretty easy notes to grab even for a novice musician.

So scales can definitely be used as melodies. We would get pretty tired of

hearing just scales for melodies after a while, but there are tons of examples

of scales, or pieces of them, appearing in melodies.

Any succession of notes that comes naturally from the mechanical skills of a

musician can be used for melody. (Of course, ones that don’t come so natu-

rally can be used, too, but that is covered in the next section.)

Each musician has strengths and weaknesses in her playing technique. If you

were to get two or three guitar players to improvise freely on the guitar, each

of them would bring idiosyncrasies to the task. But because they have cer-

tain trained habits, just the act of grabbing a few seemingly random notes has

the potential of generating excellent melodic ideas.

Improvisation is limited by skill sets, but style in some respects is a product

of limitations as well as strengths. Mining the simple, intuitive, mechanical

structure of your instrument can bring a wealth of melodic material, but

many musicians toss aside melodic opportunities because they don’t con-

sider their improvisations to be anything but momentary bits of magic. Just

because something is easy for you to play, it doesn’t mean it would be worth-

less as a melody.

On the other hand, many musicians think everything they play is golden.

Sometimes it’s hard to evaluate your own work. Criticism is better than

praise in this context most of the time. Find someone you can bounce ideas

off. If you are receiving constructive criticism, and the criticism makes some

sense to you, you are on the right track.

Learn to be a pack rat. Keep all your ideas.

Using music theory in composition ...................................................

With enough knowledge of music theory and a familiarity with the mechanics

and languages of instruments, a composer can invent melodies. These melodies

emerge from the possibilities within scales, modes, keys, and the techniques

and limitations of the musicians who will be required to play them.

For example, a composer who knows how far a breath can get a musician on

a clarinet — and the range of the instrument and its limits in terms of speed

and versatility — can write melodies for that instrument largely out of theo-

retical abstraction. Just throw possibilities and challenges at the instrument

52 Part II: Melody and Development