On Melody and Harmony

The previous drafts have been a lot more meandering than I’m used to lately, and I think that part of the reason is that this post was really amorphous in my mind. Rather than the standard folly, where I have something I know I want to express and find the way to do so, I don’t know if I ever really knew what I was trying to express in the previous drafts. Thankfully, whatever net I cast still managed to bring back something worthwhile to gnaw on.¹

Like many people, I struggle with imposter syndrome at times. These days, I find it happening almost exclusively in musical realms, and almost entirely when it comes to performance. In many regards, I can acknowledge the feeling as ridiculous. I am not trying to make a living doing music, so of course I am not as good as those who do. I know what would help my ear, and I actively choose not to do it.²

If I was just generally not as great as music as I wanted, I think that I would be more comfortable. However, I do also have some amount of pride³ in my ability to compose, which I think is where the cognitive dissonance comes in. Every professional composer I’ve spoken to is pretty clear about the necessity of not just being able to hear the harmonies and melodies one writes as they enter the page, but of being able to hear the absent harmonies.⁴ I can, at least most of the time, relatively accurately hear any individual melodic line in my writing. I can, however, almost never hear the harmonies.

As I write a piece for a dear friend’s wedding, I am finding the absolute limits of my ability to compose without paper. The frets of the guitar are welcoming and encourage certain harmonies and melodies. When I am away from it, though, I can still think about where my fingers and hand will need to be in order to make notes. So, I guess that the takeaway is that I need to accept that I cannot compose without paper, even though that hurts to admit. When composing for choir, I need an active audio playback.

Draft 2: 2025 May 6

When I was going into my senior year of college, I was debating different career options. Because I was formed for academia⁵, I knew that meant I wanted to go to graduate school next. Being a major in music with a love for composition and chemistry with a love for quantum and analytical, I asked professors what I was missing to be a good applicant to graduate school and generally successful in the industry. When we had visiting musicians, I did the same.⁶

I don’t remember what I was missing to be a good chemist, other than I think literal information. There was probably something like “be better at your lab notebook”, which I have not really done, but.

To be a successful composer, though, every professor and visiting musician I talked to had the exact same answer: a better ear was essential. Even outside of composing, the different performance based professors I worked with were often shocked at just how bad my pitch memory was.⁷ My ear is not great, and I have no real desire to do the work essential to training it. Back in college, before I had matured and learned the value of suffering⁸, I was even less willing.

And so, two futures of mine diverged and I took the one of least resistance.⁹ That spring, I then won a composition award from the music department. As it turns out, even though I do not have an emotional idea of what each interval is, nor can I play 11 notes on a piano and say which one is missing,¹⁰ I can still write music that makes the academy happy. Given the general reception to the songs I’ve written since then, I can also write music that makes the average person happy too. The only issue is that I cannot do it without a pencil and paper.

I can improvise lyric if I need to, and can figure out what should come next if given parts of a line. Given a melodic fragment, though, I cannot put the end on a guitar.

As I write a piece for my friend’s wedding, this is coming up constantly. I am nearly positive that what I want is just some scalar walking between different chords, but don’t have an idea in my hands or head how to do that when looking at the fretboard. What little I have been able to do past the moment of inspiration has been because I actively paused and reminded myself what chords were what scalar¹¹ distances from each other and how I could walk between them. Still, the more I did that, the less the new parts felt like something good.

I’m sure that if and when I go and put the notes in my sheet music editor, I will immediately know what I can do to make the song last forever. I love programmatic music, and especially for something which is meant to be somewhat ambient, having a number of touch points with transitions is great.¹² I can easily string a bunch of riffs or licks together, but need to have them first.

Really mostly me coming to terms with the fact that I don’t intuit musical instruments like I do sheet paper. That does, in my heart of hearts, make me feel like less of a musician, but it probably isn’t something horrible and worthy of despair. I don’t think that I value the skills of composing on an instrument enough to work on them, so I guess it would behoove¹³ me to internalize that I am ok with this fact.

I don’t know how I feel about this musing right now, so may revisit it before posting tonight. With two minutes until the end of the hour, I’ll call it here, though. On to the thesis.

Draft 1: 2025 May 6

While writing with my dear friend this morning, they commented that I have not been posting here lately. That’s not incorrect.

Part of me feels like any writing I do here is writing that would otherwise be done on my thesis, which is not totally incorrect. There are only so many thoughts my brain can capture, break in, and pin to the page in a given day. However, I also know that I feel more grounded if I do these follies, and that being grounded lets me capture more thoughts. With that in mind, I’m going to consciously choose to spend the remainder of this working hour¹⁴ writing this. If it doesn’t get me to the point that I want, I’ll try to return to it later.

I was talking with a friend this weekend about how we write music. She has a great intuition and ear, and just sings what feels natural. I am so far from that, at least in general.

Sure, most of my songs begin with randomly singing a line or even just a few bars. However, what comes next is that I have to painfully figure out exactly what relative and absolute pitches I sang¹⁵. Even then, I only have a single line of music.

What comes next is the part of composition that I have always found easiest: composition on the staff. I am a product of the modern era, and really love having automatic playback. However, if I am away from my computer, I can write more pleasing melodic lines simply by using a staff than I tend to be able to do without the paper in front of me. I don’t know what about me is well trained to write music.

Having written that sentence, I do realize that’s untrue. I have spent a lot of time in my life explicitly and actively studying the melodies that I enjoy or dislike. Almost all of that study has been score study, which means that I have, at the absolute minimum, a good internal intuition of what a melody should look like on the page. Add to that the fact that I have internalized the formal rules that people have written over the ages for melodies that sound good¹⁶, and I guess that it should be no surprise that I can quickly jot down something that I like for a single voice.

Harmony is always something that comes later to me, which I attribute in equal parts to my high school choral experience and general love of early music. Both of these sources center melody, and have harmony fall out as a consequence, rather than the reverse, as is more common to the academic composer.

In playing guitar, though, most of what I’ve learned is various folk and folk adjacent¹⁷ songs by looking at chord sheets. I have mostly internalized standard variations on the 145 progression, which is certainly not bad, especially since most of what I write is folk and folk adjacent. Right now, though, I’m trying to write a piece for solo guitar for a friend’s wedding.

In a stroke of inspiration late one night, I found a riff I really liked. The warm light of morning showed me it was just a walk up from A to D in tenths, which made figuring out some next options easy enough. However, because I do so little work with melody on guitar, I find that nothing I’m doing feels particularly natural. I’ve practiced enough scales that I can look at a tab and follow it, but apparently not enough to have internalized it.

I want to work on transcribing it, because I feel like it will help with getting the progression through. Right now I feel like what I have is alternating melody and fingerpicked harmony, which is not necessarily a problem. Ideally, though, I think that I’d like there to be more of a melodic line throughout, if only because that is familiar.

Draft 0: 2025 May 5

I’ve talked a fair amount in the past about how I write music, and especially how I’m writing a piece for a friend’s wedding. While lying in bed late one night, I awoke with inspiration for the hook for the piece I’m going to play this fall. Figuring out what comes next, though, has really been a struggle.

Daily Reflection 5/7

Daily Reflection 5/6

Daily Reflection 5/5

I love the viscerality of the word gnaw↩
ear training is just so low on the list of priorities I have↩
which the emotion book says is a good thing, recognition of actual accomplishment. Catholic me still says not to use it, but also hubris and pride are two separate words for a reason↩
e.g. “if you play 11 notes on a piano, you should be able to hear which one you didn’t play”↩
I can justify this statement if anyone doesn’t immediately agree↩
I interacted far more with the visiting musicians than chemistry professors for some reason, probably the size of departments and the fact that the visiting musicians did far more interactive activities?↩
I was a junior in college before the idea of remembering what pitch I had been singing was even a concept in my mind↩
read: I now practice regularly↩
the fact that it’s generally agreed Chemistry is more profitable than music wasn’t hurting the choice either↩
both of these were things that are essential, according to most of the composers↩
I love using math music words in ambiguous contexts↩
mmmm graphs↩
ooh apparently this word is archaic now, comes directly from an Old English word that means the same! Not even like a “add this part to this part”. wild↩
currently 1122, final five minutes of an hour always reserved for stretching↩
absolute because many times I sing it not near my guitar and need to know whether to figure out a different chord pattern or if I can shift the song itself↩
read: I know what normative melody is, which sounds good at the very least by virtue of being familiar to the listener’s ears and is singable at the very least by virtue of being in the shape my throat recognizes (throat? is that where the song comes from?)↩
read: early rock and a lot of punk↩
want to and am working up the motivation to↩
note to self: that’s something we can put in the paper “look, even if we have X times more data, linear increase not quadratic or whatnot”↩
SSC, AAT, if any vib states were good, what happened to the computations, etc↩
as it turns out, I don’t really love doing it with my web novel↩
yes, I do in fact reward myself for reading by going to a burger joint.↩
meaning that like none of the books I keep on my phone are dragging me in, and otherwise I don’t keep books nearby enough↩
the more times I type it, the fewer attempts it takes to spell correctly. Also, yes I’m hoping that the repetition makes me actually get it↩
another advantage of bulletin board is that I can quickly shift things around. Then again, the same is true of floor time. Might need to have floor time, especially if I finish this post earlier than expected↩
I’m currently operating under “if a part of me is easily forgotten, it’s probably not an issue right now” school of recovery↩
in addition to footnotes, I think that I’m also going to have a list of tasks for a day? I don’t really know what I need to do to make my life ordered and functional, short of maybe like getting a secretary.↩
why was that a parenthetical and not a footnote? great question. Do I think that my boss will accept the footnotes that I’m leaving in my drafts for now? Probably not. Am I going to continue adding them until she explicitly tells me to remove them? Also yes↩
I’m trying to consider tasks by urgency and overall importance when prioritizing. Unfortunately, everything is kind of either yes urgent or no urgent (is that just how my mind works?), so that’s not super helpful, because the yes urgents are almost always yes important↩
SSC, AAT, if any vib states were good, what happened to the computations, etc↩
I often comment things like “alas I do not have my backpack” as a way of externalizing that I need to get the backpack at some point. Friend just got the backpack, which I think felt bad to me because it made me feel like I was being passive aggressive?↩
mmmm off by N numbering↩
read: the time flies by in some ineffable way. How has it been more than an hour that I’ve been working and yet only 30 minutes on this document?↩
how do I distinguish them, you might ask? Really it’s that I’m willing to break meter and flow and anything else much more if it’s for a song, especially if I think that the melody or harmony requires it (probably will be in this musing)↩
read: rest is not sleep↩
as it turns out, when walking all day, one needs to consume more, not less, liquid↩
time for a post it↩
am I using this as my way of also getting things onto a page so that it’s easier for me when it comes time to post it? Yes, absolutely. Am I also using this as a form of productive procrastination? Yes, absolutely. Is this also incredibly grounding after a long weekend? So absolutely and incredibly yes↩
After writing the next two lines, realized that I hadn’t capitalized↩
had to look up the term I’ve been using real quick. Saying diagram instead of plot or graph makes more sense to me↩
does this need to be capitalized? Who can say?↩
that phrasing feels fundamentally wrong in some hard to pin down way↩
which I’m going to shift all useful things into after making sure that I have good BibTeX keys for all of them↩
are these the same? probably not, though from a flirtation standpoint, I feel like generally better to err on the side of more, not less↩
oof that’s rough to say↩
read: straighter↩
should here meaning think that I would benefit and enjoy more↩
opening a tab for that now, even though it does not get a post it↩
read: the note will say figure out what is needed to apply for a lecturing job and make a timeline of when jobs are closing. Ok that’s two notes↩
read, the one that ends the 10 hour↩
ooh I guess post its don’t have to go in the binder, I can keep them by me so I know what I said I was going to do when! Maybe? or hmmm idk.↩
entirely because I’m just noodling around a chord progression and understand melody lines better on a score than on the guitar (a musing? Today’s musing? yeah ok↩
read: message the team and ask what they’re looking for↩
mmmm off by N numbering↩
she also mostly does Christian music, and I have never really done music that connects to my faith, so that will probably be reallly helpful for me.↩

Musings

I'm just copying my father

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