Grade Five Music Theory - Lesson 14: Composing a Melody - Voices

Melody Length

The length of the melody is up to you, but a well-balanced melody will normally take up 4 or 8 complete bars: each line of text should fit into 2 or 4 bars. Often the melody will need to start with an incomplete bar, in which case your last bar should make up the beats in the last bar. Don’t forget to finish with a double barline!

Setting Words to Rhythm

The first thing you need to do when setting words to music, is to get the rhythm sorted out.

Look at your first line of text and decide which words you think have a stronger accent - these words will naturally be sung on the first beat of the bar. How easy this is depends on the words you’ve got. Here are some examples from the 2006 Grade 5 Theory Paper:

Old castles on the cliffs arise,

Proudly towering in the skies.

Here are the stressed syllables in red:

Old castles on the cliffs arise,

Proudly towering in the skies.

How did I work out the accents?

Try saying the words aloud and clapping in time. If you seem to be clapping on every word, try clapping at half the speed (but carry on speaking at the same speed). Say the lines aloud several times without stopping, and you should start to instinctively start clapping on four accented words.

Here’s another example, which is a bit harder:

The river glares in the sun

Like a torrent of molten glass

Try the same clapping exercise. Again, halve the speed of your clapping if you seem to be clapping all the time. You should end up clapping at these points:

The river glares in the sun

Like a torrent of molten glass

Now take your pencil again, and sketch in a rhythm above each line of text. Decide on a time signature before you start.

Most texts will fit into a variety of time signatures, and there isn’t one single correct answer. However, sometimes the words of the text might lead you to choose a particular time signature; for example words about a battle could suggest a marching 2/4, or romantic words often sound smoother in triple time.

Here are two possible simple rhythms for this text:

Setting Words to Melody

Decide whether the music should be in a major or minor key. Look at the words again and think about how they make you feel. If they are sunny, positive words, use a major key. If they are dark, sad or aggressive, use a minor key.

The words might also suggest a particular style to you. It could be a lullaby, a march, a love song or something else completely.

Think about word painting. Word painting is the technique of using notes to imitate the literal meaning of words in the text.

For example, if you have the word “low”, you use a low note, if you have the words “soaring” you write ascending high notes and so on. Other evocative words could be “climb”, “fall”, “sigh”, “stop” and “jump”. There won’t always be words which you can paint with, but if you can find one, do try to use it!

Aligning Text and Notes

When you write out your melody be very careful to align the text correctly with the notes. Each syllable of a word should be centred underneath the note it is sung to.

If you have a word of two or more syllables, you will have to break it up. Use hyphens (-) to link the syllables together. Break up the word so that each syllable starts with a consonant which you can sing. For example, let’s break up the word “Constantinople”. It’s got five syllables, so the correct way to break it up is like this:

Con - stan - ti - no - ple

Each new syllable starts with a consonant which you can sing.

Here are two other ways to break it up, but they are wrong:

Co - nsta - nti - nop - le

This is wrong because you can’t sing “nsta” or “nti”, and “le” isn’t pronounced that way in the word.

Cons - tant - i - no - ple

This is wrong because the “st” sound should be kept together, and the third syllable should start with a consonant.

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Here’s a notated example of some hyphenated words:

If you choose to write more than one note to be sung to one syllable, use a number of long dashes to indicate how long the syllable needs to be sung for, and connect the notes together with a slur, like this:

Beaming

In the old days, quavers and semiquavers in vocal music were not supposed to be beamed together. You were supposed to write and not

These days though, both methods are acceptable, and in fact most singers prefer to read beamed quavers.

When you write down your melody, write each note with its accompanying text at the same time. If you write all the melody first, you’ll find that you haven’t got enough space to write the words neatly. If you write all the text first, you will probably get the relative spacing of the notes wrong!

Breathing

Don’t forget that singers need to breathe, especially if your tempo is slow! You don’t need to notate breathing points, but keep in mind that it’s easier to grab a quick breath at the end of a minim than in between quavers!

Use phrasing marks to make it clear where a breath should not be taken (i.e. not in the middle of a phrase).

Voice Ranges

Write your melody for the voice which you are most comfortable with. You don’t need to state which voice you’re writing for, but make sure you stick within the range of one voice. Try to avoid extreme highs and lows of the range.