echurchill

I was wondering how the melody writing has been going. If you run into any trouble or have any concerns or complaints, feel free to tell! And don't feel obliged to post all at once. If you want you could begin a simple one and we could walk through it step by step with my suggestions. It naturally sounds strange, talking about walking you though something as simple and easy as melody.. but I understand that it might be difficult to appreciate right away the aspects of melody I intend these exercises to develop.

After all, its a fine attention to detail that I am looking for. And short melodies are the only way to refine melody free from distractions. After all, when writing a four voice fugue you will have more than enough trouble working out themes and motives and textures; your melody will need to be smooth and refined already. Not that it isn't yet, but I think we all have room for improvement.

So I guess you should strive for melody that makes sense aurally as well as theoretically. In a way I am asking you to really rely on instinct in choosing little details, like whether to leap by fourth or fifth, or whether to use a lower neighbor or upper, etc... It is because of that that I recommend singing, so that you get immediate feedback on every single note you write; writing at an instrument is totally appropriate too, and is another way to make sure you are perfectly transcribing what you hear in your mind.


Now what botheres me about the guitar sarabande is not the Dorian harmonies but the way you handle dissonance. The D on the third beat of the first bar could be an unaccented lower appoggiatura approached by leap from below.... but thats really pushing the idea since it is natural and feels more like descending (and I won't even mention that the E it leads to is an appoggiatura itself). Then it clashes with the D# in the next measure.

Also I was disturbed by the D (natural) in the last measure of the first half. Now don't think that it's breaking "rules" that I'm worried about, but in the Baroque style some of these elements don't fit in. So if you are experimenting with elements from other styles, know that I encourage but cannot be of much help since I know little about modern music; my only other influences are the Renaissance and the avant-garde of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. I could teach about the Renaissance and Baroque idea of modality, which is not quite what you are doing with the Dorian mode in this piece.


But otherwise, I was very pleased by the secondary dominants in the second half and the dissonant appoggiaturas on the dominants in bars 4 and 16. Overall it is a nice piece.


As for continuing it, for now I think you should just follow your ear until we finish this brief study of melody so that I can teach in more detail about the textures of the sarabande. I notice, however, that you could conveniently and logically end the piece with almost the exact same four bars it began with.