Everyone loves a good tune

At risk of betraying my age, I can remember the days when you heard a cheery whistling as the milkman delivered the early morning milk, and a bit later, a jolly humming or singing as the postman arrived. And, seven times out of ten, I recognized the tune. It might have been a snatch from a song in the current radio top ten, but it was more likely to have been a folk song, or a vintage tune from the 1920s, 30s or 40s, or even a theme from a popular classic.

The postman and the milkman just wanted good tunes, pleasing to the ear, easily memorable, with a catchy lilt. And people today still like good tunes. They sing them in the shower, or hum them while cooking a meal.

A melody is a sequence of musical notes, of differing pitches, which is pleasing to the ear and memorable. A sequence of notes played at random will usually not be particularly pleasing or interesting, though occasionally it might be so.. The only effective test of a good tune is whether anyone still gets pleasure from it and recognizes it 10, 50 or 100 years after it was written. A very high proportion of new music, both popular and 'serious' music, is justifiably forgotten very soon after it is first published or released, simply because it does NOT contain any good tunes! It is impossible to predict which of today's music will still be played 100 years from now. Every generation debates what defines a good tune, and there are no hard and fast rules. However, we can certainly state that all the themes contained in Musical Discovery Themes have passed the test of time. They are "classical' not only in the traditional meaning (beauty, elegance, symmetry), but also because they are proven by generations of listeners to be the best of their class.

One thing all good tunes have in common is that they are tonal. This means that most of the notes used for the melody belong to a major or minor scale. A scale is a sequence of 8 notes, starting from a home keynote, with clearly defined intervals between each note and the next. The name of the home keynote also becomes the name of the scale, for example, the scale of F major starts and ends on an F. Many good tunes start on the keynote, and nearly all end on it. Also the harmony accompanying the tune is very tightly tied to the key. Simple melodies, like those in folk tunes, quite often use only three different chords, and the chord accompanying the last note of the tune is nearly always the so-called tonic chord, i.e. the chord based on the keynote. These chords sound sweet to our ears, they are described as consonant.

The ability to write a pleasing melody is an important part of the art of composition. Some people have a genius for this, Mozart, Schubert and Tchaikovsky were such people. The old folk tunes which are still sung and played today must have been composed by people who had this gift, but we don't know their names. They were passed down by oral tradition, and have lasted for hundreds of years simply because they are good tunes. Some examples of lovely lilting melodies in the English folk tradition are Early One Morning, As I was going to Strawberry Fair, Cherry Ripe, British Grenadiers and Begone Dull Care. Click on any of these to listen to them, or to download my MIDI arrangements, which were created with Musical Discovery Themes.