WHOLE MELODIES

The following guidelines affirm some basic characteristics of complete melodic phrases in courtly and sacred art music in the 16th-through-18th centuries. Zarlino (Istitutioni Harmoniche: 1558), Reicha (Treatise on Melody: 1813), and Kennan (Counterpoint: 1999).

1. Use a good mixture of skips, steps, and leaps. Students of counterpoint tend to use stepwise motion as a fall-back plan when writing multi-voice textures, because it seems to guarantee coherence or deliberateness. In fact, a melody made of mostly steps will often seem aimless and arbitrary, because nothing distinguishes it in our memory; the notes can seem to blur into one another inarticulately.

2. Suggest a clear overall tonal progression. Melodies should clearly inhabit a single key, or at most suggest a pair of closely related keys. Although cadences may be deceptive, a particular cadence should be imaginable with the melody even when no counterpoint or harmony sounds.

3. The melody should occupy a singable pitch range, appropriate to its length of time.

• a. Complete statements in 18th-century music have a strong tendency to ranges around a 9th, 10th, or 11th.
• b. A melody’s range should sound in good proportion to its length: a short phrase (2-3 mm) can seem well proportioned at about a 7th, a 16-bar melody can stretch as many as two octaves or more if the melody doesn’t seem to have left one range behind and forgotten it for another.

4. Reach, rhythmically, toward melodic goal notes, and strong beats. (Goal notes in this case are defined not only as the cadential endings of musical sentences, but a climax, an intermediary (pivotal subdominant) harmony before a cadence, the completion of a scalar ascent or descent, or the peak or trough of an arpeggio.)

• Small note-values should be concentrated in weak beats of the measure, and reach toward strong beats.
• Increase rhythmic activity leading up to goal notes.
• Rhythmic activity should also be flowing easily on its way to a cadence.
• Static, sparse rhythms have a place too: usually early in a melody, as the key is being established.

5. Use the whole range of the melody well, touching on all of its scale-degrees. If there is more than one “peak” in a melody, they peaks should be at different notes, so that one peak can have the feeling of leading to the other. Melodic goal notes tell their own story, just as do as the rhythms and gestures leading to those goals.