Sing The Mood
Feb. 3, 2024
In the previous article, I wrote that I need the mood to sing before creating a song. Then, as a result, where does the mood appear in the song?
In the previous article, I wrote that accompaniment can get me in the mood to create a song, and the mood makes me create a song. Also, introduction gets me in the mood as well as accompaniment. The following is the introduction to New Year’s Delight. This was very suitable to make my mood calm and bright.
But the introduction has no originality. What identifies “this song” is the melody. So the mood is worthless unless it appears in the melody.
By the way, what does a melody consist of? I had thought that the most important factor of the melody was the ‘pitch movement’. But as I wrote songs, I noticed that in most cases the pitch moved only one or two along the scale.
Below is the first phrase succeeding the introduction. All notes move only one up or down on the scale, or don’t move at all. But this phrase represents my mood of the new year well.
The fact that a melody can be created simply by moving up and down on the scale means that the musical scale is an excellent melody generation system.
However, the scale itself is not a melody.
This is not a melody at all. But listen to the following.
You must have known right away what song this was. (And you can’t help but want to sing the rest, can you?)
The pitches of this phrase are exactly the same as the descending scale. The basic rhythm is also 4 beats for both. However, unlike just a simple musical scale, this phrase has a joyful mood. These two are so different, but the difference is only in the length of the notes.
The basic rhythm of the song repeats the same 4 beats until the end of the song, but the pattern of the melody note length is different in each measure. So it should be called something other than “rhythm”, but I don’t know what it is called in music terms. Here, I’ll call it “rhythmic swing”.
Then the answer to the question, “What does melody consist of?” is “Movement of pitch” and “Rhythmic swing”. And there are so many variations of rhythmic swing that they cannot be patterned. So, in an exaggerated way, it can be said “mostly one by one movement along the musical scale” and “variety of rhythmic swing”. This is very different from the answer I was thinking before.
Now, I return to the first question: “Where does the mood appear in the song?” Below are the phrases that I improvised, getting into different moods. I played them while searching for good melodies, so they are not music at all. But please listen to the difference.
These phrases are made for the later article “Carve Out Theme“. It was written before this article.
The first thing I notice is the difference in tempo. It is the largest factor for the expression of the mood. But it’s so natural that I don’t have to think about it. What I focus on is that the difference of mood appears in rhythmic swing rather than in pitch movement.
After finding this fact, I got to think the melody like below is no problem. It’s the beginning of Tyrrhenian Coast. The pitches change nothing in first measure, and in the next measure, pitches change only one by one. But I think this phrase well expresses the mood of the sea in spring.
It was when I composed New Year’s Delight that I realized that rhythmic swing was an important factor. When I was composing the song, I wanted change the mood in the middle of the song. I tried many melodies, and the one that changed the rhythmic swing was the best. The mood was able to change without changing the tempo. It was a discovery. I changed the swing twice, in measures 21 and 29.
⇒New Year’s Delight : Stuff Notation ↗️
The change in measure 21 came naturally, but the change in measure 29 took some effort to find. Finding different rhythmic swing has become one of the joy of composing music.
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Photo by minaho on PhotoAC