At Song School at the Snowbird Mountain Music Festival there were several sessions where we got to choose a brief workshop based on topic. The most interesting one I went to, taught by Steve Seskin, was on melody. I’ve been to a number of songwriting workshops and had various song critiques, and none of them has ever focused on melody. So it was fascinating to thinking about it explicitly for a session. Many of the techniques or concepts we talked about I could find in my songs – apparently I know them, at some subliminal level. (The best thing for anyone’s songwriting, I think, it to listen to a lot of songs, something I’ve been doing since I was little.) But I feel like I gained a whole new vocabulary and set of tools to think about explicitly. There were four main concepts we discussed. The first was melodic rhythm, which is where the words fall rhythmically in the melody. You can take exactly the same phrase and make it slow and drawn out, or fast and staccato, and how you do it emphasizes differently what you’re saying. (It’s also just a good idea to have variations in melodic rhythm across a song.) That was perhaps the most illuminating of the melody concepts we discussed – we had a couple examples where Steve asked someone for a random lyric line and sang it in completely different melodic rhythms to show how it changed what the line implied. The second concept was the chords – what chords get played under which melodic lines and why (especially because in most cases there are many possible different chords for a different note). Some of this discussion had to do with which types of chords are likely to come at what points in a song (for instance, the chorus often starts on a non-tonic chord), but also included things like how often you change chords (and having variety in that). When I had my song critique (which was right after the melody workshop) Steve used some aspects of my song to point out things I had done well pertaining to some of these concepts, including the fact that I used a chord/melody structure twice and then moved (on the same set of notes) to the relative minor chord instead, which gave it a different emphasis. He also brought up what he called the “rule of two” – if you do something melodically appealing, you should do it more than once, but you shouldn’t do it more than twice. The third concept was the idea of range – how far the notes move from each other (and from the starting point), and where the largest range appears. Again, variety is useful – it can be good to have notes in close proximity to each other in one section of the song and then taking up greater range in a different section (often the chorus). As with melodic rhythm, what’s happening with range emphasizes certain parts. This issue also came up in my song critique, because my bridge (consciously) uses a broader/different range than the rest of the song, but Steve suggested that it was actually too different without enough payoff (back to the rule of two – if I only go to a certain note once it can feel orphaned). Finally, the other concept was one I hadn’t thought of before: what beat of the measure your melody comes in on. Once again, variation across different sections of the song can be good, and how you do it creates emphasis – such as having an important lyric happen on a downbeat. Again, he illustrated this point with another random phrase from the group that he created a melody for, coming in on different beats. It was fascinating how much changing the beat changed the sentiment. I had known to pay attention to two of these – range and chords – and when I look across my songs I can see how I’ve used the other two without even knowing it. But it’s exciting to have my attention called to them and to consider what effect they have on a song. And, most importantly, it was the first time I’ve spend time consciously thinking about aspects of melody and what impact they have, which felt like a good enough reason on its own to spend time in a different songwriting community.