There’s a songwriter lurking somewhere inside you, peeking around corners, wondering if it’s safe to come out. Now it is. This course is an invitation to let your inner songwriter step into the sunlight. All it takes is a simple “yes” and you’ll be climbing that windy hill, marveling at the view. If you haven’t written any or many songs, this course will show you an efficient, effective process for tailoring songs to express your ideas and emotions. If you have, you’ll look at your process differently, taking control of aspects of the process you may have not noticed. The course will start by examining the tools available to you, all revolving around the essential concept of prosody. You’ll learn to use your tools to enhance your message—to work compositionally at the same time you’re developing your ideas. You’ll be working both lyrically and musically, though musically it’s not necessary that you either read music or play an instrument. If you play, great, and you’ll be encouraged to play and record your musical responses to the assignments. If you don’t play, the course offers you a number of musical loops to work with. All you’ll have to do is sing your melodies over the loops. Assignments will ask you to post something for peer review—sometimes lyric lines or sections, sometimes melodies, sometimes both. None of it has to be polished. The course is about writing, not performing. Most important, you’ll have a lot of fun.
Melody
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来自 Berklee College of Music 的课程
Songwriting: Writing the Lyrics
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从本节课中
Writing the Song
In this lesson, you’ll select a new song title and create a worksheet to help develop your ideas. You’ll write your lyric and set it to music, matching your lyric rhythms to melodic rhythms. You’ll create a melody, using stable and unstable notes to support your ideas.
与讲师见面
Pat PattisonProfessor
Leonard Bernstein, in his brilliant lecture series given at Harvard
in 1973 called The Unanswered Question, talks about melody.
He uses a metaphor, he calls melody, the noun.
It's the thing, it's the thing with meaning.
He calls harmony,
the chords, the adjective. And then calls
the rhythm, the verb. I really like that.
So that the meaning is in the melody. The stroking
of the meaning, the the, the coloring
of the meaning is in the harmony, is in the
adjective, but the melody itself creates the meaning.
The first thing we need to do is go out and buy Bernice her wedding dress.
That is to say, Hobo Wind, oh Hobo Wind, is Bernice.
And so we have to make sure that Bernice looks as good as she possibly can.
Before we start worrying about the bridesmaids.
In order to make Hobo Wind expressive, how do I
feel about the wind? Do I feel like I'm one with it?
That I'm, I belong to it? That it's home for me?
[SOUND].
Or that is to say, do I feel stable relative to Hobo Wind?
Or do I feel like the wind is out
there doing something that I wish I could be doing.
Going and exploring, going and seeking, moving away from the place
that I'm stuck in. And of course, it's the it's the latter.
And that's one of the reasons by the
way, that we're in this minor tonality, which, by
itself, because of that minor third that flat six
and that flat seven creates that sense of longing.
Those flat, the flat three, the flat six and the flat
seven are way down or way up the harmonic series.
They don't
occur until quite late in the harmonic series.
And so consequently they feel a little less the
minor tonalities feel less stable than the major tonalities.
of course that's that's not a surprise.
So that we have the minor tonality going for us already in the sense
of longing, but when I talk to the wind I probably don't want to
be on the word wind, I probably don't want to be on a stable tone.
And so after some exploration of my various
options in my unstable tones, maybe using the
second degree of the scale, the B in A which we call
the nine. maybe that might be the
note for wind.
That might be the the veil, that might be the, the train on the wedding dress.
That might be the wedding dress itself.
So let's try the B, the second degree of the scale, which wants to
resolve to one wants to resolve downward to one and feels sort
of like it's hanging, which may be fairly expressive of how I'm feeling
in terms of wanting to join the wind, wanting to become one with it.
but un,
unable to do that.
[MUSIC]
It'll be coming up right here.
Oh, hobo wind.
[MUSIC]
It feels fairly expressive. Try that again.
Oh Hobo Wind.
I think Bernice looks okay. and so now that we have
her in this gorgeous, gorgeous piece of
of, of dress. the one that gives
us exactly what she is at her essence. now
we can go back and start looking at the
bridesmaids. The thing that we don't want to
do, of course, is hit that note in a really focused
position before we get to Bernice. That is, we want to
save something for the wedding.
We want to make sure that when we get there, it's special.
That none of the other bridesmaids are already stealing her thunder.
All right.
So that's I think a, a, a, a reasonable place to start.
making sure that the target that you want to
hit is something special and that you're going to
keep it special as as we go. So now we're just looking at melody.
[MUSIC]
Do re me fa so la te do, that's our scale.
[MUSIC]
Now, we're talking about the wind.
[MUSIC]
We're talking about the wind as a fairly active, fairly moving thing,
and so a fairly active, fairly moving melody might work very nicely.
and I thought that I might try a rising melody for the first line, and
then see if we can ultimately reverse that motion and so on.
So now that we have Bernice
dressed up, we can start thinking about what we might try to do in the verses.
Now, there is certainly a great argument for just going
[SOUND]
[MUSIC],
playing the track, and just trying
[MUSIC]
Stuff.
and then hit something you like, say hey, I like that.
And you move.
And you know, which of us doesn't work that way?
I think it's helpful to think about it a bit.
To engage your brain and try to focus our
feelings a little, in, in in, in a helpful direction.
So we're talking about longing here. the A minor tonality
that we're in again already expresses longing.
But we have four unstable tones that we might be able to use.
And those unstable tones will actually increase
the feeling of longing if we use them.
Well now, of course we've already used the B, the nine, and so
that's Bernice's dress and so that's off limits now for any of the bridesmaids.
But in terms of
thinking about what we're saying. We're talking about being in motion.
We're talking about the wind.
The wind rising and falling and swirling and being very active outside.
and consequently we'll probably want a fairly active melody.
And you know, something that, like the wind perhaps
rises and falls and so on. And so g, bearing that in mind, taking
that as a sort of channel to to focus the experimentation of melody in.
I thought it might be really interesting, if, say for example this first relatively
active line, might might rise like the wind and and
so I tried a couple of things and
[MUSIC]
came up with some things I liked. And this is the thing I liked the best.
I hear you out there crying
[MUSIC].
Which rises, again.
[MUSIC]
I hear you out there crying. So that seems to work.
duh duh duh duh da da. Moving through
stable to unstable, stable to unstable tones, keeping the thing in motion.
[MUSIC]
And rising as it goes. not a bad place to start.
I thought.
and so if that's happening, then in the second line, should should I descend?
maybe not.
I've got a bunch of lines to go, the descent can maybe wait.
So maybe I'll keep that second line in motion.
[MUSIC]
but remember the first line is about the wind, about
me hearing and then the second line transfers to the wind.
That's kind of trying to do something but can't.
It's trying to get in.
So let's keep that line a little more static.
[MUSIC]
I hear you out there crying. Begging, let me in.
[MUSIC]
I hear you out there crying.
Begging, let me in. So that seems to work okay.
Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, da, da. Ba da, ba da da.
>>
[MUSIC]
>> And so now let's see if we can find something that,
like the wind, you know, is going to change direction instead of moving up.
Let's try to move it down a little bit.
[MUSIC]
Maybe.
[MUSIC]
I hear you out there crying, begging let me in.
You make your way between the cracks. That's not bad.
[MUSIC]
You make your way between the cracks
[MUSIC].
Okay, and now the fourth line.
[MUSIC]
You make your way between the cracks, I hear you move.
I hear you. Now here, on the word laugh.
The wind is not mocking me
The wind, I don't feel happiness about the wind.
That is, this is not a happy laugh.
And so this seems to be a place where I could actually use
the melody note as an adjective to modify the word laugh.
And not make it a sarcastic laugh, but make it a kind of sad or unhappy laugh.
And so looking
at the various unstable tones I have left, I thought maybe the
D, the 4th degree of the A minor scale might work there.
[MUSIC]
You make your way
between the cracks.
I hear you moan. I hear you laugh.
[MUSIC]
I hear you laugh.
That seems to express a lot about the
laughter, that is the note itself, because it's unstable.
And note that once you, again, divide this prosody thing, this support thing, into
stable versus unstable, and apply it actually,
to the scale that you're working in.
Where are the stable notes, where are the unstable notes.
Then, you're choices are very clear.
Otherwise, you're simply operating on instinct.
And not that instinct is a terrible thing, you need it all the time.
But you need to have informed instinct.
And so just the, just the knowledge that D is an unstable tone in A minor, in the
key of A minor, gives me the opportunity to try that and see how it feels.
Now
I'm not going to use it just because theoretically it's unstable.
But I'm going to use it because my heart says, oh that feels just right and I was
directed to that note because my brain told me
that you could try this and it might work.
Which is a whole different thing than just hit and miss.
So I like the D there. I, I, I like that fourth
degree of the scale on A-minor as expressing a kind of modified laugh.
[MUSIC]
So now we'll try the singing as you pass, and maybe that can be more stable.
>>
[MUSIC]
>> for two reasons. Number one, because the wind is singing.
The wind is you know, out there doing that thing.
And secondly, because the stability of the notes in singing as you
pass is going to open up the instability of the nine on Hobo Wind.
You know, that is to say, if pass was also an aching, longing note, then when
we get to the, the nine, the B on Hobo Wind, then again, the
maid of honor who came out just before Berniece is going to be really hot
which we don't want. So we'll try to stay fairly
stable in the singing as you pass line.
[MUSIC]
I hear you out there crying.
Begging, let me in. You make your
way between the cracks. I hear you moan.
[MUSIC]
I hear you laugh, singing
his pass. O Hobo
Wind, Hobo
Wind. That seems to work.
Now that may not be perfect and that may not be where we end up at the end
of all of it. But it seems like a workable place.
And the nice thing, of course is, that since we're working here in an
A, A, B, A form, that this melody should work for all three verses.
At least with maybe a few modifications here
and there, should work for all three verses.
Because we're very careful to put the to, to create
the verses with the with the same structure,
and therefore they will hold the same melody.
Now, is that always important, to have the verses, always have the same structure?
Well, no.
it, it, it really depends, in this case on how important melody is.
And for me, in this song, melody is
a huge player.
And so when I'm writing the lyric for this idea, which
is not a, a Who Let the Dogs Out kind of idea.
it's it's something where it's lyric-driven.
It's it, it, it's idea-driven.
and in that case the melody is going to be pretty important, it seems to me.
So yeah, keep, keep your, keep your lyric working
for you.
if you don't have melody and you're working with your lyric, still, try to
keep everything as parallel as you can to open the door for a melody that works.
Of course, now it's it's really up to us to to actually see if this melody will
carry over to verse two and verse three, which we'll look at in the next segment.
