Summary:
Chapter 3 unwinds the first of the five principal musical parameters: melody—which is given the anthropomorphic simile of the “face of music.” It begins with a set of introductory sections on the basics and building blocks of melody: pitches, intervals, and scales; it continues with the more holistic aspects of melody: shapes, phrases, motives—including the ambiguity that can exist between what constitutes a melody and a melodic fragment. Next, it broaches for the first time (to be explored in greater detail in Chapter 10) how widely melodies can vary, in character and musicological content, from one culture to another. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some common ways that melody relates to text and text-setting. In all of these discussions—as with each of the parameter chapters—musical examples are provided to clarify the concepts.
Supplements:
( More detail on the many intervals larger than an octave ):
Whether melodically or otherwise, moreover, for intervals larger than a 13th, a compound description is usually used: “an octave and a 7th” instead of “14th”, “two octaves and a 2nd” instead of “15th”, etc.
( More detail on historic censure of the tritone, and its difficulty to sing ):
For example, the tritone was called diabolus in musica in the anonymous 9th century theoretical treatise, Musica enchiriadis (“musical handbook”). With regard the melodic tritone in Western music, virtually no instance of a tritone leap exists in the huge repertory of Gregorian chant—with a “proving the rule” exception in the Responsory chant “Tenebre factae sunt”, between the end of one phrase (on B) and the start of the next (on F). Even in J. S. Bach’s music, melodic tritones are rare, used only in particularly dramatic textual moments—such as in his cantata Ihr werdet weinen und heulen, BWV103 , in the opening chorus (m. 29-30), on the word “heulen” (howl).
( More detail on common scales in the Western tradition ):
Technically, there are three distinct types of minor scales in the Western tradition: the “natural minor” (shown in Figure 3.6b), the “harmonic minor” (like the “natural”, but with a raised or sharped 7th degree), and the “melodic minor” (with both a raised 6th and 7th degrees when ascending, and like the “natural” when descending). Further, there are other, more “exotic” scales used occasionally in the Western tradition, including the whole tone scale—a 6-note scale consisting only of whole steps, heard for example in the music of Impressionist classical composers like Debussy and Ravel, and by jazz performers such as Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans.
Principal Bibliography:
Judy Plantinga and Laurel J. Trainor, “Melody Recognition by Two-Month-Old Infants,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 125, no. 2 (2009): EL58–EL62.
Alan Lomax et al., Cantometrics: A Method in Musical Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California, 1976; first published 1943)
External Links:
"Melody" (Encylopaedia Britannica)