When teaching music, one thing I notice, whether it's improvisation or composing, is that kids always want to move. Step by step, marching forwards. One note quickly onto the next. Often their attempts at melodies end up sound more like scales just going up and down on repeat.
I'm about to resolve this with emphasis on one-note melodies and how incredibly creative the concept can be.
You see, one single note can work in a lot of different contexts. Commonly, we do this in the bass, which we call a bass pedal. Basically, the bass note stays the same while chords on top change. The unchanging bass note serves as an anchor point for the ears to latch onto, so we can be more adventurous with the harmony without feeling lost.
It's incredible powerful
But you can also have a pedal on top, melodically. There are two awesome examples that spring to mind. The first is a song I have only just listened to from Steven Wilson's latest album. The song is called
The Buddha of the Modern Age
In this song, it mostly repeats a pattern of 4 quite cool chords. Crazy chords. The structure of this song is essentially that of layers, building and thickening the texture over 3 minutes, growing in intensity the whole time.
The vocals are, as you guessed, a single pitch. It's also a single rhythm, one note per beat. But boy does it hit hard.
The chords underneath, eventually, become extremely dissonant cluster chords of seemingly almost every note all at once. Honestly, without sitting and studying I have no idea what they are, which is surprising for me.
With the melody staying in one place however, this is enabled by that anchoring concept.
Beethoven's 7th
The same technique is perhaps far more masterfully demonstrated by Leonard Bernstein, a musical legend himself:
As he says:
This is one of the most unremarkable melodies ever written
Throughout this timeless piece of heaven, the chords underneath change, march forwards, push the intensity just as my first example.
As many famous musicians point out - Jacob Collier, Victor Wooten, Charles Cornell:
Every note goes with every other note in the right context.
To really nail the point home, this will open your eyes to this superpower:
And once my students learn to understand this, the goal is to USE it. Improvise a solo with a single note, and see where it can take you.
A traditional education will teach you that there are wrong notes. A C# is wrong in the context of C major. But by using this anchoring concept, all the dissonance in the world can and will work with the right knowledge.
So powerful!
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