- Hi.
In grade five theory,
you'll have a question
that asks you to compose a melody.
And it's quite a big question,
because it's normally worth 15%
of the entire marks on the paper.
But lots of people are
rather frightened of it,
because they think,
I have no idea how to write
a melody, or they find it
difficult to hear what they're
actually writing on a page.
However, in many ways, it's the most
creative question on the paper.
The chance to compose your
own short piece of music.
So it's a skill well worth developing.
There's an alternative to this question
which involves setting
some words to music.
And if you look back to
the sessions on grade four,
you'll find there's a whole lesson
dedicated to how to set words to a rhythm,
which was the grade four requirement.
For grade five, you'd have
to write a melody as well.
We're going to concentrate on the question
that's inviting you to write
an instrumental melody,
and hopefully if you decide to go
for the words option, you'll pick up
some tips on how to write a
melody that fits your words.
I'd start with a rhythm, and then
think about the melody later.
But when you come to
writing the melody for that,
all this should apply in some way again.
It might be argued that writing
the instrumental melody
is a slightly easier
option to deal with in
the exam than having
to deal with the words as well,
but that's entirely up to you.
And some people will be very skilled
at dealing with words,
because they're singers,
or they've got a background of singing
in choirs or working with words,
and if that's where you're comfortable,
then go for that question,
it's a wonderful thing
to do to set words, to
start to write songs.
Here's the kind of
opening you might be given
for the writing of an instrumental melody.
You'll be given possibly
the first two bars,
possibly a little bit less
than the first two bars,
and then you'll be asked to complete
a melody that's eight bars long.
Now, I've just sort of sketched out
eight empty bars with
the given two bars in,
so we can begin to see
what we're dealing with.
And as you can see,
we're in the bass clef.
One very important thing to establish
early on is which key we're in.
So three sharps, if we have a look
on the circle of fifths, we'll see
that three sharps belong to
A major, or to F-sharp minor.
And it's a very good idea to know
whether you're writing a melody
in A major or in F-sharp minor.
Looking at what we've got so far,
the first clue is that
there are no accidentals.
So that's kind of hedging in favour
of the melody being in A major,
but let's see if there
are any other clues.
Well, it starts on A, so
that's not necessarily
always the case that we start on
the tonic note, but it's an indicator.
When we look at the first
bar, we see A, C-sharp, E, A.
It's a kind of arpeggio of A major.
Or you could say that A, C-sharp, E
all looks like a tonic triad in A major.
So it's looking as if we're
writing a melody in A major.
Now, one thing I'm
going to suggest to you,
there are lots of different
ways of doing this question,
and if you can begin to
hear what you're doing,
and you want to be very creative,
then there'll always be credit
given for that if it works.
If you're a little bit less sure,
let me give you a little bit of help
into a method that might get
you writing these melodies.
First thing is let's
just number these bars
so we know which bars we're talking about.
One, two, three, four,
five, six, seven, eight.
And really, if you've got eight
bars, it rather lends itself
to two phrases that are four bars long.
So we could just begin, couldn't we,
by including a phrase mark
over the first four bars,
and another phrase mark
over the next four bars,
so we can see that we're dealing
with two four-bar phrases.
While you sketch out the bars like this,
don't forget to include a
double bar line at the end.
It's amazing how easy it is to forget
to put that double bar line at the end,
and it may just cost you a mark or so,
so make sure you've got the
double bar line at the end.
Now, one thing you can do,
is you can look at bars one and two,
and you can think, well, I'll just copy
those two bars into bars five and six.
Now you might think, well,
that sounds like cheating,
if I copy two bars into bars five and six,
well, that's half the melody written.
And I'm not really creating anything,
I'm just copying something.
Well, that's true, but there
are many pieces of music
where that sort of thing happens.
You have a phrase that
starts in a particular way,
and then it goes off in one direction,
and then the next phrase
starts in exactly the same way,
and goes off in a different direction.
So it is a sort of technique
that many composers use.
And as a starter, you could always copy
bar one into bar five
and bar two into bar six,
and then if you want to do something
to elaborate it or to
change it in some way,
well, you could come back later
and have a think about that.
But for now, let's just begin
by copying bar one into bar five.
And immediately we'll start to feel better
about tackling the exercise,
because so many bars are already complete.
And of course, that
being the given material,
there are things here
that we might want to use
in the other four bars,
and it's a good idea
just to try and have
some idea in your mind
what this actually sounds like.
You can kind of feel
this arpeggio coming up.
And then some notes that more
or less move by step after that.
You may just begin to get
the idea of this melody.
Let me just play you the first two bars.
So you might just have begun
to hear that shape in your mind.
Anyway, for the purposes of
trying to get something down
that is going to give us a
reasonable eight-bar melody,
copy bar one into five,
copy bar two into six.
Now, I'm going to move next to bar eight,
which may seem a strange thing to do,
but when we come to the end of the piece,
we want things to settle,
and we want to feel
that we've gone home to A major.
So we don't want to finish on
some strange note of the scale
like the leading note,
we don't want to finish
on a G-sharp because the
melody won't sound complete.
We want it to settle rhythmically,
so we don't want to finish
on a hemidemisemiquaver,
because it won't sound
complete if we do that.
So we want to finish
on a fairly long note,
and maybe the tonic note.
Now, the easiest thing
in the world you can do
is fill the last bar with the tonic note.
You can do something more
adventurous than that
if you want to, but you could,
for example, just think,
well, I'm just going to
finish with my tonic note, A.
We could do something more adventurous
in due course, but it would do for now.
Now, we talked about cadences
in an earlier session.
And remember what we said, the
last two chords of something
form a cadence, that bit
of musical punctuation
that makes the ends of the phrases clear.
Well, how about we think
about a cadence at the end?
Now, if we're going to finish on a tonic,
and we want a full-stop finish,
then we want a perfect cadence
or a plagal cadence, really, don't we?
So how about, for now, we
go for a perfect cadence,
which would give us chord V in bar seven,
and chord I in bar eight.
Now, what we're going to
try and do in bar seven
is to use notes that belong to chord V.
Now, how about we go and
maybe have a minim there,
and we go up to G-sharp and then up to B,
that would be the easiest way of doing it,
because in A major, chord
V is E, G-sharp, and B.
And don't forget, if you're
at all worried about this,
sketch out the chords, so you've got them.
Let's just quickly do that
without doing every
single chord of the scale.
We'll do a quick shortcut, shall we?
Let's have these in the
treble clef for now,
although you can write
them in the bass clef
if you're happy doing that.
Remember, we need to know about chord I,
chord II, possibly,
chord IV,
and chord V.
So if we just put the
triads together, there's I,
and there's II, there's IV, and there's V.
It just helps us to spot
the notes, doesn't it?
So, you see, chord V is E, G-sharp, B.
E, G-sharp, B.
So, you can see that already I've got
the makings of an ending, because
I've got the notes of
chord V in bar seven,
and I've got a note that
belongs to chord I in bar eight.
So it's going to make a perfect cadence.
Now, you might already be
looking at that, thinking,
well, that's okay, but there seems to be
an almighty big gap
between these two notes.
So there's nothing wrong with
just pencilling in that A
that we did at the beginning,
but then if you think,
goodness, there's a huge leap there,
you don't really want a huge
leap before the end, do you?
So we may decide we're going
to move this note up an octave.
It's the great thing
about working in pencil,
that like any great composer,
you can have an idea
in pencil, and you can rub
things out, rearrange them.
But you gradually evolve into the melody
that's going to work for you.
So we could just sit on that
A at the end, couldn't we?
If you thought, well actually,
it's a little bit boring,
just sitting on that A
for a semibreve, there's
nothing to say, well,
if all these notes belong to chord I,
isn't there any reason why I couldn't
just use notes that belong to chord I
to fill up the bar a little bit more
so we've got something a bit
more interesting going on?
So we could do something
like, have an A there,
and then come down to E,
because that belongs to chord I,
and then maybe have a
minim bottom A at the end.
Well, already, that's beginning to look
a little bit more interesting, isn't it?
As I look at bar seven now,
I can see I've got notes
that belong to chord V,
but it's not looking
amazingly exciting, is it?
So far, the last two bars sound like this.
And if I look back to
the previous two bars,
I can see the rhythm is a bit
more interesting, isn't it?
Listen to bars five,
six, seven, and eight.
Doesn't sound bad, actually, does it?
But I wonder if we could spruce
up bar seven particularly,
so we've got a little bit of this
rhythmic interest that
we've had from earlier on.
Well, one thing I could do is possibly
to turn that into a dotted crotchet,
and then here I could slip
in one of these passing notes
that we were talking about
in an earlier session.
So instead of going,
this passing note gives me this.
That already sounds more
interesting, doesn't it?
I could even put another
passing note in here,
because whenever you have
notes that are a third apart,
you could try filling in the gap.
So how about this, let's
put a passing note in there.
So we've now got.
Suddenly that bar seven has
come to life, hasn't it?
And if I put the second phrase
together, we've now got this.
And you can hear that we're going
to have a cadence that's
implied by using those notes.
So if I do the last two bars with chord V
accompanying it, and then chord
I, it comes out like this.
So you can hear that the melody
is implying a perfect cadence.
Okay, well you can carry on forever
just sort of modifying
things, and tweaking them,
and improving them, and in the exam,
if you've got time to spare,
that's a very good way
to spend it, just to see what you can do.
There's always a danger
of overelaborating things
and thinking, my goodness, I could get
lots of semiquavers into bar seven.
We don't want to overdo it, but we want
to have enough interest in it to make it
interesting to listen to, and to make sure
that what you've written sort
of matches the given material.
Now then, if this is a full-stop cadence,
in this case a perfect cadence,
you could have written a
plagal cadence, of course.
You could have had chord IV in bar seven,
that would be fine as well, but we decided
to go for a perfect cadence here.
A full-stop cadence, anyway.
Well, probably, at the end of bar four,
we want to have a comma cadence.
An imperfect cadence.
So really, in bar four, I'm looking
for something that belongs to chord V.
Well, let me just start
exactly as we did in bar eight.
Chord V, E's at the bottom of chord V,
so let's just stick an E in that bar.
We could fill the whole
of bar four with an E.
That's one way of doing it, isn't it?
Now, if this is going to
be an imperfect cadence,
in bar three we're going to have to
use I, II, or VI, because we're going
I-V, or II-V, or IV-V.
So we've got to decide
what we're going to do.
Doesn't really matter,
but for argument's sake,
let's use a chord II.
Now, chord II, B, D, F-sharp.
I wonder if there's something
I could do with that.
Well, when I started in bar seven,
I took chord V and I
went root, third, fifth,
and built up the chord.
How about we do something
similar in bar three,
but this time we'll go down the chord,
so we don't do the same sort of thing,
we kind of turn it upside down.
So in other words, start
with the top note of II,
come down to the next one, and
come down to the bottom one.
So we could do something
like this, for starters.
So you can see that in bar three,
I've got notes that belong to chord II.
Followed by E that's the root of chord V.
And again, it sounds perfectly
reasonable, doesn't it?
Now, again, just as we looked at this,
this is just looking a little
bit plain at the moment.
We probably want to have
a bit more to spruce up,
to match some of the rhythmic interest
that we had in the first two bars.
Now, I suppose I could do
exactly what I did here,
put in the passing notes
and have exactly the same rhythm,
but maybe that's a little bit obvious.
But what we could do
is something like this.
Let's turn the F-sharp into a crotchet,
and then we could repeat the F-sharp,
and then use a passing note,
how about that as an idea?
So we've now got.
Even that makes it more
interesting than it was before.
I could put another passing
note in here if I wanted to.
I could put another note
at the end of the bar.
I mean, these are all possibilities.
When we get to bar four,
it seems a little bit sad
just to leave that poor old
semibreve on its own
filling up the whole bar.
But if I do this again,
that's going to be a bit
too obvious, isn't it?
But let's not overcomplicate it.
How about we go E for a minim,
and then I come down an
octave at E for another minim?
And that would just give us a
little bit of interest there
that's sort of on the same
lines as the last bar,
but again, not exactly the same.
How do the first four bars sound?
Well, that seems to work
quite nicely, doesn't it?
You could, if you wanted to make
life a bit more
interesting here say, well,
we had this dotted
rhythm here, so we could
maybe have that same dotted
rhythm at that point.
That makes it sound like this.
Certainly it's beginning to sound
much more satisfying
as a melody, isn't it?
So we end up with two four-bar phrases.
The first finishes with
an imperfect cadence,
and the second finishes
with a perfect cadence.
Though as I say, it could
finish with a plagal cadence.
And we've mapped the same
start of the phrases,
and then we've done something
different in the second half,
so so far it all goes like this.
Which works quite nicely, doesn't it?
Now, if you're running out of time,
you could leave that quite
happily at that stage.
Don't forget, though, that
you need to add a tempo.
Now, I don't know if you feel this is
a fast piece or is a slow piece,
or something in between,
but you could put a word
like moderato at the top.
Plenty of Italian or
German or French terms
that you would know,
but how about moderato,
just giving us that moderate feeling?
And if you feel it faster or slower,
then that's fine, you can call it allegro,
or andante if you like.
You might want to include
a rallentando at the end,
by which case, just to slow
down in the last two bars.
So if you wanted maybe in bar seven
to write ral or rit, you could do that.
You might want it just to
get a bit quieter at the end.
So slow down and get a
bit quieter at the end.
You could do that,
you might feel the thing
rather differently.
You want to put some
dynamics into it as well,
so maybe we could start at a sort of mf
moderately loud, and then if we're going
to get quieter at the end, maybe
we could get louder towards that midpoint.
So have a little crescendo
up to the cadence there,
and maybe a forte for the cadence.
And then the second phrase
could maybe go back to MF again.
And then you're going to slow down
and get a bit quieter at the end.
What you don't want to
do is to put thousands
of dynamics in the piece,
because that's not how music is.
We're much more subtle about the
changes that we include in music.
So starting there, getting a bit louder,
coming back to the starting point,
getting a bit quieter, that would be
a perfectly reasonable
scheme for eight bars.
But you could think of
other possibilities as well.
And then you would already have chosen
and instrument, because
for grade five theory,
you're always given a
choice of two instruments.
For example, this in the bass clef.
You might have been invited to write
for the cello or the bassoon, for example.
It's an important thing just to make sure
you're writing inside
the range of instruments.
There's a session in the
grade four list of sessions
we've done on instruments and telling you
a little bit about bottom notes
where they become important.
The bottom note of the flute is middle C,
the bottom note of the oboe is B-flat,
they're the ones that sometimes cause
a little bit of trouble with this.
But the cello or the bassoon could play
all these notes quite happily here.
If you're writing for a string instrument,
you might want to put some bowing in,
but if you're not a string player, well,
it might not be a bad idea
to choose the bassoon option
if there's a string and
a wind option, because
you don't really have to worry
about bowing for a bassoon.
Then make sure that any other marks
that you decide to put
in the score make sense.
You might want to put an
accent mark in or something.
Maybe you want to mark out these two notes
at the end of the first phrase
and have an accent mark there,
that would be rather nice, wouldn't it?
But don't write things like pizzicato
if you're writing for the trumpet.
Because pizzicato means
plucked, and it's something
that only a string player
would expect to do.
So don't write things that
don't belong to an instrument.
But this gives you an idea how
you might go about the task.
If you've got time left
at the end of the exam,
you might want to have another look
at bars five and six, and think, well,
is there a way that I could elaborate
that a little bit so it's not quite
just a simple repetition
of bars one and two?
Even if it was fairly
straightforward things
like doing something like this.
And then you'd have to modify
the rhythm a little bit here.
So you could just get something
slightly different going
on in those two bars.
And then you could decide
you're going to repeat
this first G-sharp, for example,
and do something like that.
So our first two bars go.
And these two bars go.
You could even decide you're
going to dot this quaver
and turn this one into a semiquaver.
And then you could do something like that.
And suddenly you're just sprucing
up a little bit that repetition.
So the completed melody
that we're going to offer
at this stage is one that goes like this.
And that would do pretty nicely.
Anyway, I hope that's given you some ideas
on how to tackle this kind of question.
And good luck with your melody writing.
It could be the start of a
wonderful composing career.
