Music Theory: How To Write Memorable

Motifs and Melodies

askaudiomag.com by Jay Asher March 1, 2015

So you're writing melodies and motifs that sound good... how can you improve
these? How to make them sound better and work better in your songs? Jay Asher
has some advice to share.
When I first arrived in Los Angeles, a year after I had graduated from Boston
Conservatory of Music with a degree in Composition, like most young composers
who came here I struggled to get songs published and hired to score films and
TV shows. Clearly, I still had much to learn. However, pretty much right away
industry people told me that I had a gift for melody. Now considering that I sang
early on and wrote songs from the age of 12 there was some natural talent there,
but I really believe that an exercise required of us by my composition teacher,
the late Dr. Avram David, made a huge difference and I would like to
recommend it to you. I did this on score paper back then but you can either do it
that way or in a DAW.
Our first assignment from Dr. David went something like this: I want you to
turn in for every class for a week as many pages of free melodies, no time
signature adherence required, as you can stand only using the interval of a 2nd.

AND, you must try to make it as interesting as possible as we will play them at
the piano and compare everyones attempts.
Here is a small example:

Week 1: After a week of writing this, all of the composition majors were ready to
scream because it was so limiting if you wanted it to work as music. But when we
played them at the piano, dagnabit, by consensus some students attempts
WERE more interesting music than others.
Week 2: Now you may occasionally add the interval of a 3rd, but you must
then immediately go to a 2nd in the opposite direction. See Pic 2.

Oh my... such artistic freedom, the world is ours! Dutifully, we wrote page after
page but soon this too became so restrictive, waterboarding was looking less like
torture than doing this more.
Week 3: Now you may occasionally add the interval of a 4th as well as a 3rd,
but with the 4th you must then immediately go to a 3rd in the opposite direction
while with 3rds continuing to go to a 2nd.
In the words of Martin Luther King, Free at last, God Almighty we are free at
last!

But wouldnt you know it after we wrote page after page after page, this became
maddening to the point where we all discussed carpentry as an alternative
career.
Well, it doesnt take a genius to figure out that eventually 5ths, 6ths, and 7ths,
were allowed and then the minor versions of those intervals, all with restrictions.
After all was said and done, we did this for the whole first semester. It drove us
absolutely crazy but everyone agreed that they now wrote better motifs and
melodies because of this exercise. The really funny thing is that even when we
started writing 12-tone music, we did so more interestingly for having done this
so much.
Give it a try!