Writing Variations on a Melody

Hey composers! I've recently noticed (thanks to the help of some great comments by others :w00t:) that I have serious trouble writing variations on a good theme. Does anyone have any tips on how to develop that skill?

Any ideas would be appreciated!

Variations on a theme has come to mean any number of perspectives on the same musical idea. If you examine some of the basic aspects of a melody, you have for example time signature, rhythm, tempo, accompanying harmony, and of course the notes themselves. In one variation, you could reharmonize the melody while formatting the melody for 6/8 time (which invariably affects the rhythm) and make it faster. Another possibility is taking the melody into the parallel major or minor key and reworking it, let's say, from an upbeat melody in major to something slower and more reflective in minor or vice-versa.

Yet another component could be the instrumentation; take a melody, present it however, then give the melody to a different instrument and change the accompaniment; the harmony and rhythms of an accompaniment can be enough to add variety to the melody.

Any combination of the above, or something a little wackier like retrograde or inversion of the melody, can add variations to a melody. My recommendation is to take as many aspects of the melody you're working with and try and reexamine that same material from a slightly different perspective by altering aforementioned elements. Practicing always helps. :(

Thanks for the ideas! :P

You can practice variations in a number of fields:

Harmonization:

1) try changing the accompanying chords

2) try changing between the minor and major modes

Rythm:

1)vary note length: to do this you need to sense which note needs to be accented and change the note length around it

Melody:

1) add figurations

2) changed some notes

for this, as in rythm, you need to sense which notes are more important and not to change those.

Hey composers! I've recently noticed (thanks to the help of some great comments by others :rolleyes:) that I have serious trouble writing variations on a good theme. Does anyone have any tips on how to develop that skill?

Any ideas would be appreciated!

I think at the outset of doing variations, you have to ask yourself some questions on what you are going to keep, and what you are going to discard in any particular variation.

A melody, as an entity, has fixed intervals, rhythm and duration. A variation of a melody would keep an aspect of it, so as to be recognized as being derived from the melody, and it would change something else about it.

Being diverse in this area is only limited to your imagination and knowledge.

In the following example I will only work with the melody(stupidly simple and short, I know), not accompianment, harmony, voicing and register etc.

For instance, lets say you have an 8 quarter note melody in common time. You decide to keep the intervals, and their placement, and vary the rhythm. Your variation is recognized as derivitive of the melody by 2 aspects:

1) The note names of the intervals, or their relation to one another(if the key is changed)

2) The placement of the intervals.

Comma seperates time in which notes occur. In this example A,B = one quarter note for A and one for B.

Dash seperates measures.

Example: (all quarter notes) A,B,C,A - G#,B,A,A

Sample variation per above using 8th notes:

AA,B,C,A, G#G#,B,A,A

Sample 2 per above, using 16th notes:

ACEA,B,C,A - G#BEG#,BABA,A,A

These are very simple variations used to illustrate the point of retention and discard.

Any variation you do, if it keeps the placement and intervals of the melody intact, will be recognised as a variation.

Let's do an example of discard of a note, while retention of other interval relationships, and their placement:

(..) means prior note is held over on the beat.

AA,(..),CC,A - G#A,BG#,A,A

Now, addition of other notes (E):

AE,BE,CE,AAAA - G#E,BDBD,AE,AE

The retained notes and their placement remain the same, but some are shortened.

I hope this helps. I know these are very simple examples, but they serve to illustrate the point of retention and discard. When you get more experience, you can use more and more aspects of the music (harmony, orchestration, accompianment etc, key changes, voicing, register) in variations.

I would also study Beethoven's, Mozart's and Haydn's music to see what they do to vary a melody. Often these are labled and numbered as "variations", but you'll note in many works, secondary melodies are derived from principle melodies, episodes from melody fragments etc. The guilding principle is to retain (practically, repeat) something, and discard something else. Too much retention leads to monotony, too much discard leads to less recognition.