Melody & Texture

A photograph of three girls and a boy, who appear to around ten years old, singing into a single microphone in front of a gray curtain. A group of school children singing in Pyongyang in 2008.
(stephan | CC BY-SA-2.0)

While music can be comprised of many different elements, the most prevalent and significant for most people is melody.

Melody

While arts like painting, sculpture and architecture create works that generally do not change over time, music is a temporal art: a musical performance occurs over a period of time, interacting with the listener's memory and expectation.

At the most basic level, a melody is a collection of pitches played sequentially rather than simultaneously. More broadly, however, melody is one of the most fundamental ways a listener perceives music, whether it serves as a vehicle for delivery of lyrics or stands on its own.

A photograph of a man in a white uniform standing in a military cemetery, playing a silver trumpet.
Figure 1: Musician Petty Officer 1st Class William Dunn plays Taps at a US Navy funeral in Arlington in 2017. Bugle calls are simple melodic pieces which carry special meaning for military groups and similarly structured organizations.
(Elizabeth Fraser | Public Domain)

Melodic Range

When discussing melody, theorists will sometimes refer to the range of a melody: the distance between the highest and lowest pitches the melody uses. This can be an important consideration for vocalists, who must consider whether or not a particular melody fits well into the range of their voice.

Melodic Motion

The type of motion a melody influences not only how easy the melody is to perform, but also how memorable or "catchy" the melody is for the listener. A melody's motion describes the difference in pitch between successive notes: a melody with large jumps in pitch from one note to the next is said to have disjunct motion, and is often more difficult to perform.

Of course, a single melody can contain multiple types of motion; it is common for a melody to be predominantly conjunct, having mostly small pitch intervals, with occasional large leaps for musical effect.

Figure 3: American singer and actress Judy Garland, portraying Dorothy Gale in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, sings Somewhere Over The Rainbow, by American composer Harold Arlen and American lyricist Yip Harburg. The chorus of the song begins with a large upward leap, evoking the feeling of soaring into the sky.

Melodic Contour

Theorists often analyze a melody's contour: the overall shape of the melody's pitch. The most basic melodic contours — and the most common — are ascending melodies, which start relatively low and gradually move upward; descending melodies, which start relatively high and gradually move downward, and melodic arcs, which tend to start low, move upward to a high point, and then return to the original pitch area.

Texture

While there are well known examples of music which — like German composer Johann Sebastian Bach's Suites for Cello and American singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega's 1982 song Tom's Diner — consist of a single musician performing one part, most music consists of multiple parts played simultaneously. The character of each of these parts, and their relationship with one another, is referred to as the piece's texture.

Monophony

Music that has a single line of melody, even if the part is performed by multiple musicians simultaneously, is called monophony. Folk songs like Kumbaya are almost always monophonic in their basic form, though they are often performed in more complex arrangements. Religious liturgies, such as those in Judaism and Western Christianity, commonly use monophony in the form of psalmody and chant.

Melody & Accompaniment

When included as part of a public performance, live or recorded, monophonic songs are often played with an accompaniment: an additional part consisting of music that supports the melody without obscuring or competing with it for the listener's attention.

A photograph of Seo2 and MC Nauck rapping into microphones on stage while DJ Caso and Nick Calaveras perform on separate DJ rigs in the background.
Figure 5: Chilean rappers Seo2 and MC Nauck perform with Chilean DJs DJ Caso and Nick Calaveras in Santiago in 2011. A rapper performing with a live turntablist is an example of melody and accompaniment.
(Ignacio Silva Ferreira | CC BY-2.0)

Accompaniments can take many forms, from single instruments to large ensembles, and can be specifically composed, improvised, or even prerecorded. Singer/songwriters often self-accompany, singing a vocal melody while simultaneously performing an accompaniment on keyboard or guitar.

Heterophony

In some cases, a melody can be combined with a version of itself with an altered rhythm or tempo, such as in Indonesian gamelan music or Japanese gagaku, where a single notated melody is played at multiple tempos by different instruments simultaneously. This texture is generally considered a form of monophony called heterophony.

Homophony

When two or more lines have different melodies which share the same rhythm, the resulting texture is called homophony. Homophony is common in choral music, where multiple vocal parts might sing simultaneous lyrics on different notes to create harmony. Hymns, in which a traditional melody is arranged in three or four parts for congregational singing, are an example of homophony.

Polyphony

A texture in which multiple melodies of equal interest and importance are played simultaneously is called polyphony. Polyphonic textures can incorporate counterpoint, a process in which different melodies are designed to complement one another in regards to pitch and rhythm to create a musically effective combination, or they can be written to emphasize elements of dissonance between them, as in polytonal and polyrhythmic styles of the 20th century.

Melody & Texture: Summary

  • Melody refers to how individual notes are connected to each other sequentially, and serves as one of the most fundamental ways people perceive music.
    • A melody's range describes the distance between the highest and lowest pitches it contains.
    • Melodic motion describes the difference in pitch between successive notes. A melody with many large leaps is said to have disjunct motion; smaller intervals in a melody is called conjunct motion.
    • The general path a melody's pitch takes is called the melodic contour.
      • An ascending contour starts at a lower pitch and moves generally upward.
      • A descending contour starts at a higher pitch and moves generally downward.
      • A melodic arc starts at a lower pitch, reaches a high point, and then moves back downward.
  • Texture describes the relationship between different musical lines in a piece.
    • Monophony consists of a single line, even if multiple parts are playing or singing the same line.
      • Melody and Accompaniment describes a texture with two parts, where one part is meant to be the focus of the listener's attention, and the other part provides harmonic and rhythmic support.
      • Heterophony is a less common texture where a melody is combined with one or more versions of itself at an altered rhythm or tempo.
    • Homophony is a texture consisting of two or more lines with different melodies and the same rhythm.
    • Polyphony consists of two or more parts with different melodies of equal importance.

Exercises