A lesson on Melody Writing

It is Thursday today. My music theory classes are scheduled on Thursday evenings.

The earlier part of today's lesson was spent going through the Two-part writing homework that I have done over the weekend. There were a lot to be learnt from the mistakes I had made. It was quite insightful. Now I realised how I can tell which notes are passing notes that do not require to be harmonised, and which are the notes that need to be harmonised.

Thereafter, my tutor covered about four chapters from W. Lovelock's Melody Writing during the second half of the lesson. Some of the materials from these four chapters were similar to what I have learnt earlier from First Year Harmony by the same author.

For example, "avoid augmented intervals".

There seems quite a number of technical rules to follow that I think good composers ought to deserve sufficient recognition for their abilities to compose good music intuitively. I said "intuitively" because my tutor claimed that some composers can be so good that they can just write a good melody without being conscious of the rules. Very likely, these people could have a good inner ear to tell what makes a good melody? Surprising, the melody would just fit well into the rules, and more importantly, it would sound great.

Maybe everyone has a gift of his/her own? I wonder what is mine?