A melody, also tune, voice or line, is a linear succession of musical tones that the listener perceives as a single entity. In its most literal sense, a melody is a combination of pitch and rhythm, while more figuratively, the term can include successions of other musical elements such as tonal color. It may be considered the foreground to the backgroundaccompaniment. A line or part need not be a foreground melody. Melodies often consist of one or more musical phrases or motifs, and are usually repeated throughout a composition in various forms. Melodies may also be described by their melodic motion or the pitches or the intervals between pitches, pitch range, tension and release, continuity and coherence, cadence, and shape.
Elements
Given the many and varied elements and styles of melody "many extant explanations confine us to specific stylistic models, and they are too exclusive." Paul Narveson claimed in 1984 that more than three-quarters of melodic topics had not been explored thoroughly. The melodies existing in most European music written before the 20th century, and popular music throughout the 20th century, featured "fixed and easily discernible frequency patterns", recurring "events, often periodic, at all structural levels" and "recurrence of durations and patterns of durations". Melodies in the 20th century "utilized a greater variety of pitch resources than ha been the custom in any other historical period of Western music." While the diatonic scale was still used, the chromatic scale became "widely employed." Composers also allotted a structural role to "the qualitative dimensions" that previously had been "almost exclusively reserved for pitch and rhythm". Kliewer states, "The essential elements of any melody are duration, pitch, and quality, texture, and loudness. Though the same melody may be recognizable when played with a wide variety of timbres and dynamics, the latter may still be an "element of linear ordering."
Examples
Different musical styles use melody in different ways. For example:
Jazz musicians use the term "lead" or "head" to refer to the main melody, which is used as a starting point for improvisation.
Rock music, and other forms of popular music and folk music tend to pick one or two melodies and stick with them; much variety may occur in the phrasing and lyrics.
Balinese gamelan music often uses complicated variations and alterations of a single melody played simultaneously, called heterophony.
In western classical music, composers often introduce an initial melody, or theme, and then create variations. Classical music often has several melodic layers, called polyphony, such as those in a fugue, a type of counterpoint. Often, melodies are constructed from motifs or short melodic fragments, such as the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Richard Wagner popularized the concept of a leitmotif: a motif or melody associated with a certain idea, person or place.
While in both most popular music and classical music of the common practice period pitch and duration are of primary importance in melodies, the contemporary music of the 20th and 21st centuries pitch and duration have lessened in importance and quality has gained importance, often primary. Examples include musique concrète, klangfarbenmelodie, Elliott Carter's Eight Etudes and a Fantasy, the third movement of Ruth Crawford-Seeger's String Quartet 1931, which creates the melody from an unchanging set of pitches through "dissonant dynamics" alone, and György Ligeti's Aventures, in which recurring phonetics create the linear form.
