- Copyright Page
- About the Editors
- Contributors
- About the Companion Website
- Introduction
- Pitch, Tone, and Note
- Interval
- Mode
- Scale
- Tonic
- Timbre
- Texture
- Repetition
- Meter
- Temporalities
- Groove
- Phrase
- Form
- Expressive Timing
- Melody
- Consonance and Dissonance
- Tonal Harmony
- Key and Modulation
- Cadence
- Sequence
- Polyphony
- Musical Grammar
- Analytical Relationships
- Images, Visualization, and Representation
- What Is Music, Anyway?
- Beneath Improvisation
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
Melody is a fundamental concept in Western musical thought; it connotes the form and affective power of successive sounds in motion, perceived as an aesthetic unity. Yet for many writers, melody does not exist as an autonomous form, and for those who credit its existence, few agree on what it is, or how it functions in relation to harmonic voice leading and phrase rhythm. This chapter examines the historical emergence of a theory of melody in the West, from Aristoxenus to Leonard Bernstein; it traces the rich intellectual currents that saw melody variously coupled to ideas of voice, schemes of rhythmic symmetry, overtones, spatial organization, theories of evolution, and computational analysis.
Keywords: voice, melos, history of theory, Dahlhaus, Kurth, intervals, Rousseau, Wagner, overtones, pitch peak
David Trippett is Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Music and a Fellow of Christ’s College, University of Cambridge.
Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.
Please subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.
For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.
- Copyright Page
- About the Editors
- Contributors
- About the Companion Website
- Introduction
- Pitch, Tone, and Note
- Interval
- Mode
- Scale
- Tonic
- Timbre
- Texture
- Repetition
- Meter
- Temporalities
- Groove
- Phrase
- Form
- Expressive Timing
- Melody
- Consonance and Dissonance
- Tonal Harmony
- Key and Modulation
- Cadence
- Sequence
- Polyphony
- Musical Grammar
- Analytical Relationships
- Images, Visualization, and Representation
- What Is Music, Anyway?
- Beneath Improvisation
- Index