Great subject!

Every week or so, on "The Beat," a locally produced program on KUOW-FM (my local NPR affiliate), the host interviews a singer-songwriter, either local or passing through. The singer-songwriters invariably talk at length about the deep, personal meaning of the songs they write, and the host has them perform some of their songs during the program. Very introspective songs most of the time (i.e., read "navel-gazing"), and usually personal commentaries on their particular view of the human condition. These are songs that I have never heard before, of course. Often they are quite long, not because of the depth and breadth of the concepts they contain, but because what the writer considers to be the crucial line or lines are repeated many, many, many times. Even so, I sometimes have difficulty getting any kind of sense of what the song is about, except in the most general way.

The accompaniment is almost always a guitar, and although occasionally the person is fairly skilled (nice bits of finger-picking and/or chord sequences), it seems to be endemic among singer-songwriters that their instrumental skills are all too often pretty primitive, even if fairly smooth in execution. A typical accompaniment consists of a sort of six-string up-down "whack-a-whack-a-whack-a-whack-a" and harmonically, they tend to be sort of blah. The song is almost invariably in 4/4 time. I don't recall any at all in 3/4 or 6/8.

And the melody. It frequently seems to be little more than a chant or drone whose limited movement is rarely more than stepwise—up a note, down a note. Many long phrases sung on one note, with occasional movement up or down to an adjacent note, but rarely a jump of more than a third. The maximum range of the song usually stays within a fifth or a sixth. Rarely even as wide as an octave.

I'm convinced that the reason these melodies are very limited in scope is to keep well within the tessitura (comfortable range) of the singer-songwriter's own singing voice. It doesn't ask much of the singer's voice, and that often makes for a lack-luster performance of a lack-luster melody. Nor does it really engage the listener's ear. It's hard to perceive a distinctive melodic pattern from phrase to phrase, much less remember the tune half a minute after the song is finished. The truth is, there is darned little tune to remember.

These are songs that I doubt very seriously I will ever hear again. Nor will I have any sense of great loss because of this.

Okay, now that I've trashed singer-songwriters in general, this is not to say that they're all that way. They are rare, but there are some very good ones. Tom Paxton, Joni Mitchell, and Townes Van Zandt are three singer-songwriters that pop into mind who have displayed a real knack for good melodies. Some folks are fond of putting him down, but John Denver had an excellent ear for writing good, memorable tunes.

So what makes for a good, memorable melody? Not an exact science, but given the almost infinite variety possible, there are some common characteristics. Good melodies consist of a mixture of both adjacent scale steps and jumps, sometimes jumps of a fifth or sixth, occasionally as much as an octave. A good melody often challenges the singer's vocal abilities, and this applies, not just to operatic arias and art songs, but to folk songs and ballads as well. This judicious mixture is what makes a melody interesting. And memorable. And often has you humming or whistling a song after you've just heard it. And sometimes even later.

Lots of the more memorable songs start out with one or more leaps, like climbing up or down the notes of a chord. A common beginning is a leap of a fourth, from a low fifth degree of the scale up to the tonic, and may continue to climb scalewise after the jump. Think of the first four notes of "How Dry I Am" or "Down in the Valley" or "Plaisir d'amour" or the dozens or hundreds of songs that may be in different rhythms, but start with the same four notes. More often than not, an upward or downward leap of a fairly large interval (fourth, fifth, or larger) is followed by a movement of a step or more in the opposite direction, but generally not back to the original note right away. It moves away from the tonic (key note) and ambles around, teasing your ear, which wants to hear it move back to the tonic note, the most stable in the key. A good melody may hover around the tonic, hitting it briefly from time to time, but quickly skips away again.

Suspense. Even though we may not know consciously what's going on, we've all heard music (the music of whatever culture we grew up in) from infancy, and our brains have become wired to expect the music to do certain things. But a good composer or songwriter knows, either consciously or by intuition (whatever that is), that a good melody (or any musical sequence) consists of setting up a pattern that your ear expects it to follow or repeat. The next phrase or line leads the ear to expect the same thing to happen again, then it does something a bit different. It teases the ear—and the mind. It continues this way, sometimes adding a new but similar pattern, and does the same switcheroo with that. And then, in the end, just like a good story, it takes you back and resolves the suspense. The melody note goes back solidly to the tonic and the final chord change goes from a G7 to a C, and that's it. Wow! Tension relieved.

But some melodies don't do that. Some leave you hanging, giving you a sense that the song is unfinished. Think "I Know Where I'm Going." The melody ends on the fifth degree of the scale, and the final chord is a dominant 7th (G7 in the key of C). Drop the other shoe. It leaves you thinking, "Does she know where she's going?"

More often than not, I find that a song I want to learn, and generally wind up learning, has a good set of words (a good story or lyric), and the melody, or at least a piece of the melody, becomes an "ear-worm" after I've heard the song. (An "ear-worm" is one of those melodies that keeps playing in your head and you have trouble shutting it down. Sometimes just about drives you nuts! Commercial jingles are notorious for this, and that, of course, is the whole idea.) The melody keeps playing in my head and I find myself learning the words, singing the song, then picking up the guitar and working out an accompaniment. And another song goes into the notebook and onto my list. Once I've got the song down solid, I'm okay. Until the next song with a good set of lyrics and an "ear-worm" comes along.

A friend of mine gave me an excellent book that I'm really enjoying. It's This Is Your Brain on Music : The Science of a Human Obsession, by Daniel J. Levitin. Levitin is not some ivory-tower music professor. He was a rock musician, a sound engineer, and a record producer before he got into neuroscience. Early in the book, he gives you the basics of music theory, clearly and concisely, without getting bogged down in a lot of technical jargon (relatively painless way of learning the essential ideas). Throughout the book, he names pieces of music—some classic, but more often, rock and pop songs—as examples of what he's talking about. There is the occasional dry spot where he, of necessity, has to get a bit technical, but they only last for a paragraph or two. For the most part, it's a pretty easy read.

I've taken a lot of music theory classes in college, and I've also take a course in the physics of music, so I already knew a lot of this, but the neuroscience of music is an area that I knew was there, but never actually explored. What sneaky things do composers and arrangers do and why do they do them? And why do people respond to music the way they do? Why do you respond the way you do?

Levitin has a thorough discussion of this matter of setting up patterns and then doing the unexpected. He talks about melodies before this, but on page 115, he discusses melodies in particular. Among the examples he uses is a well-known melody that moves almost entirely stepwise, with very few jumps in it (contrary to the usual principle of mixing steps and jumps): the main theme of the "Ode to Joy" from the last movement of Beethoven's 9th Symphony (what person who has heard that doesn't remember and recognize it, even if he or she doesn't like classical music?). And then he explains why it works when other similar step-wise melodies don't.

Terrific book. I recommend it very highly to anyone involved with music, either as a performer or an avid listener.

Don Firth