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Melancholy

Musical

Example

Melancholy

Secret

Score

Melancholy

Animated

Score

Introduction

Melancholy is more than just a feeling of sadness. An element of deep thought is tied to this emotion. When a person feels melancholy, there is an awareness of sadness as well as a gentle wish to either make it go away or to cling to this bittersweet emotion. In either case, there is a thought process in action. To express this musically, you need to create more than just sad melodies and harmonies; you need to build a musical structure that has some repetitive movement.

Examining the Melody

In this deceptively simple example, we make both the melody and harmony slowly rise and evolve. We immediately establish a mournful melody in bar 1, played by the cellos:

This is not so much a melody as it is a brief five note motif. For the remainder of the composition, we will take this five note motif and re-state it, each time starting a note or two higher than before.