Motif and Variations

1. Melody and Memory

“What is a good melody?” is a simple question yet difficult to answer. It may vary depending on genres as well. But when thinking in reverse—what is a bad melody?—There’s one criterion hitting on me: An unmemorable melody.

As a matter of fact, there’d hardly be anyone making helter-skelter melodies even if they don’t know music theory at all. However, it can well happen that they result in uncharacteristic, unimpressive or unmemorable melodies.

This trumpet melody flows beautifully without any crash against accompaniments. Despite the perfect harmony, now that you finish listening, can you recall the line you’ve just heard? —I bet the beginning part has already started to slip out of your memory. It’s not just because you listen to it for the first time, but also because it actually lacks a clear structure that can stay in your head.

It may sound cool that you write a melody right from your mind on impulse, naturally, spontaneously like how a man of genius does… But without skills to intuitively design the whole architecture of a melody, the line can easily get obscure and characterless.

So this is where we should start from—Review how to shape a clear structure in melody from theoretical perspectives, instead of leaving such “architectonics” totally up to your feelings.

2. Motives

There’s but one thing that can bring a sense of structure to melodies: Repetition. From the patterns and forms of repetition listeners can recognize where’s the start or the end of a melodic block.

Classical Music and Repetition

This is Symphony No.5 by Beethoven, whose very first phrase “da-da-da-dum” is distinctly renowned.

In fact, this song repeats the phrase again and again with changing pitches while keeping its rhythmic shape. Such repetitions imprints the phrase into listeners’ subconscious, by which a song establishes its identity.

End of a Repeat = End of a Block

And another key for forming a clear structure is; to stop repetition at an opportune moment.

Giving up persistent repetitions here acts as a declaration of closure like it’s putting a period to a musical sentence. Like the “da-da-da-dum”, a small seed of a phrase from which the variations of phrases develop is called a Motif.

It is one of the fundamental policies in Classical music to elaborately develop motives to construct large architecture.

Pop Music and Repetition

Developing motives is common in popular music too. In the song above the phrase “I turn the music up”, the rhythm “da-da-da dum-da-dum” acts as the motif.

Many variations arise from that motif and the repetition continues until the phrase “heaven is in sight”, which works as a punctuation mark here.

It can be said that the scheme used here is essentially identical to the Symphony No.5, though the two songs are 200 years apart in age! Utilizing repetitions and variations is a principal theory for melody making in any genre.

3. Three-Phased Model

Summing up, the basic strategy can be illustrated as the “three-phased model” : First expose of a motif, secondly develop it by repetitions or variations, and lastly dissolve it by abandoning the repeat. The last process, dissolution, is technically termed Liquidation¹.

In fact you don’t necessarily have to go into liquidation—just exposing a new motif will make listeners indirectly recognize that a block is ended. But liquidation will definitely help them clearly understand the structure of a song.

4. Developing Patterns

From here, we’ll discuss the typical patterns of melodic architecture.

(1) Pure Reprise

The simplest way of forming a structure is just purely repeating the phrase without any changes just like copy & paste.

Porter Robinson – Sad Machine

This song starts with a motif played by the synthesizer, consistently repeated throughout the song.

Melodies in intro

In this case, a slight development is found in the fourth phrase, which acts as a weak liquidation. The melody line is mostly composed of just copy & paste, but other elements such as chords, beats or sounds make the song develop.

In electronic music, pure repetition is widely accepted as culture. It can also be easily found in other genres such as rock or funk.

(2) Appending Notes

Not by changing pitches, but by adding a short note at the head or the tail of a motif is another strategy.

My Chemical Romance – Welcome To The Black Parade

This song has a notable part where the persistent repeat of a simple phrase continues from 3:32 to 4:02. The phrase “Do or die” exposes the motif “ta-ta-tan”, which is the motif in this part.

“Do or die, you’ll never make me”

The motif is developed by adding notes both on the head and the tail. But as these two notes have a weak accent and the “body” being kept unchanged, you almost feel it like pure repetition. Especially in vocal based music, this technique is frequently used to fit lyrics to melodies.

Nested Blocks

And what is interesting here is; this block works as a new motif and creates a rather bigger level structure.

“~we wanna play this part”

The new motif, which has a repetition inside itself, is developed again and becomes a part of the new repetition structure. And surprisingly, this whole block again is repeated with some variations and finally goes into liquidation at the end of the part.

“~I don’t care!”

It’s like a Matryoshka doll!! Note that by virtue of this triplex architecture the very atomic motif “ta-ta-tan” is repeated 22 times throughout this part. Such multi-layered form is called a Nest. Creating nested blocks is a very clever strategy to impress motives on listener’s mind.