The_Complete_Idiot%27s_Guide_To_Music_Theory

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Part 3: Tunes
The complete melody for “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
on the traditional labeling of tones using the letters A through G. Each tone in
the song is assigned a letter corresponding to its precise pitch; anyone reading
the letters knows which tone to sing or play.
Assigning tones, of course, is only half the story. When you sing “Mary Had a
Little Lamb,” you give each tone a specific rhythmic value; each tone takes up
a specific place in time. The rhythm of the song is described by using different
note values, the half notes and quarter notes that we call music notation.
By combining the pitch values with the rhythmic values, we can now notate the
entire melody of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” The notes on the staff tell us what
pitches to sing; the note values tell us how long to sing each pitch.
The result looks like this:
All melodies are described using similar notation. You set the key signature and
the time signature up front, and then fill in the notes of the melody from there.
Naturally, you have to arrange the notes within measures, with each measure
holding the appropriate number of beats. When you’re done writing down the
notes, you’ve written your melody.
Common Melodic Techniques
Every song—every piece of music—has a melody. Some longer pieces (such as
much orchestral music) have multiple melodies. Some melodies consist of multiple
parts, with different parts repeated in different parts of the song. However
the music is constructed, the melody is the heart of the song—the part you should
be able to sing or hum or whistle all by itself, with no other instruments needed.
To get a feel for how melodies are constructed, let’s take a look at some melodies
from well-known pieces of music. You’ll see that although they all have their
distinct sound and feel, these melodies also have a lot of factors in common.
Dvorˇák’s New World Symphony
We’ll start with a tune from Antonin Dvorˇák’s Symphony #9 in E minor (“From
the New World”)—more popularly known as the New World Symphony. This is a
popular piece of orchestral music, and consists of several different sections; the