When last we left this week’s overview of the Berklee songwriting class I’m taking, we’d gotten through sketching out rough lyrics of the three verses of a song, in the method Pat Pattison demonstrated through writing a song called “Hobo Wind.” It’s a method pretty different from how I typically write a song, although there are echoes of things I do without necessarily consciously doing them. The form of the song he was demonstrating was verse/refrain, verse/refrain, bridge, verse/refrain. So he explicitly waited to write the bridge until he’d written the verses, since (true to the metaphor of its name) its goal is to bridge two things; you need to know what needs to be connected before you connect them. Bridges also want to sound different (and so far the only sounds we’re working with, since there’s no melody yet, is melodic rhythm) than the verses. So for his bridge he had just three lines (preserving the instability – it felt like there should be a fourth line that rhymed with the second, but that would make it too stable and not create the movement that a bridge should), and the first and third were only one word (“sing”). Also bridge-related (consistent with, but a different concept of how bridges have been explained to me in the past): the bridge is a place to fill in other details that are important to the song but haven’t been fully fleshed out otherwise. So, building off the “hymn” rhyme that turned up at the beginning and with a few other hints throughout, he wanted to push the idea of the musical nature of the wind. And it hadn’t been made explicit, so talking about singing in the bridge could do that. OK, next step: melody. That’s the most different from my process, in which melody and lyrics tend to develop simultaneously; only once or twice have I ever written the lyrics to a song before the music. He also introduced the concept of melody being stable or unstable (theme of the entire course: stability vs. instability). I’ve thought about the feeling of the chords used – not just major or minor, but the chord position (tonic, dominant, subdominant, etc.) and where they want to lead, and could see how that relates to stability. But Pat’s message here was that the positions of actual notes in they key provide stability and instability. Most stable, of course, is the tonic (followed by the octave). Then comes the 5 and the 3. (the quiz we had on this was ridiculously easy; all you needed to do was figure out which was the 1,3, 5, and 8 note in a scale and any question asked about them required labeling them “stable,” and all others “unstable” (with varying degrees of instability). Pat then proceeded to write a melody for his song, ending the most important lines on unstable notes. And it created a song that had a nearly un-singable melody – so much so that as he was demonstrating, he kept having to cue himself to the note he was about to sing (those particularly unstable ones) by hitting them on the keyboard as they were approaching. I suppose the whole thing felt unstable – which was his point – but it didn’t sound like a song I would want to sing or listen to. (It made me absolutely certain that I would write a song I wanted to sound stable for this week’s assignment!). It’s funny; I’ve always used “what it feels like I should be singing” as a key to what the notes should be – not to write the melody, but once I’ve sketched it out, if I keep having trouble heading to a note I’d written (or automatically take the melody somewhere else) I’ve used that as a sign that I needed to follow my instincts on what it should sound like. Not because there’s some automatic right-ness about automatic responses, but because mine are conditioned by a lifetime of listening to the kind of music I want to be writing. And if it’s too hard to make my melody go where I’m trying to get it to go, it’s probably because I’m trying to force it to go into a place where it shouldn’t go. This piece of the process was the first time I’ve not found value in a piece of the lesson. I do think that there are notes that are more or less stable (just as there are chords that are), and that’s a useful idea – but it can be vastly overdone, as it was here. A couple more melody suggestions: the chorus (Bernice’s wedding dress, from the analogy way back at the beginning of the course) should be the most glorious part melodically, AND it should go to a melodic point that hasn’t been used before. Second, the melody should reflect the sentiment of the lyric – so if the line is describing something in motion, it should move around more melodically than if it’s describing something stable. Both of those make a lot of sense. Finally, “setting adjustments” – adjust notes or words to make the whole thing fit together well, and then back to the bridge (again, the last thing) to put a melody to it. A fascinating method, that is quite different from my approach. It bears some similarities to it – I pay a lot of attention to what he calls the “sonic fabric” (the internal sounds) of the verses etc.; I just get to it differently. I do find the worksheet concept (searching for whole families of sounds before you write) to be interesting and potentially useful. And although I really didn’t like the results of his using musical notes to induce instability, I do think that thinking about the character of the notes you’re using in a melody (and where they’re leading) does make sense in a melody. I’ll have to try writing a song the Pat way – in fact, I will have to, for this week’s assignment.