Is Harmony More Important Than Melody?

It’s an age old debate, should I focus on the chord progression and voicings or should I prioritize the melody and individual lines? The beautiful thing about music is that there’s no right answer. However, regardless of which camp you are in, you should try to surround yourself with other opinions and resources so that you can make more informed arranging decisions. That way when you hit a roadblock you have a better shot at getting out of it. That’s at least what happened to me.

When I got into writing I had limited harmonic knowledge so like many I simply wrote music based on the melodies I heard in my head. That all changed once I went through university, where the majority of music classes taught harmony and specific rules that were considerably easier to grade compared to something as subjective as the idea of what makes a good melody. That’s not to say the classes weren’t amazing, it’s just that they pushed my creativity in a different direction. 

Once I graduated I was 100% a music theory nut. I only wrote music I could justify through analysis and that organic nature of melodic writing I once relied upon was pushed somewhere deep within. The voicings I wrote followed strict shapes I had been taught and at the end of the day my arrangements all sounded rather similar to one another. For the most part this wasn’t a bad thing outside of my own passion projects as it meant I could write efficiently and churn out charts for clients quite quickly. However, over time my inspiration for arranging began to dwindle.

Alongside this time in my life I kept myself busy by focusing on other areas such as my education business. Through this particular avenue I had the chance to produce a number of concerts and events which put me in close contact with a wide range of local and international musicians. Without realizing it, an interaction with one of these artists started to shift my view of writing away from harmony and back to melody. And with the help of one particular conversation I now find myself seeing just how important both aspects are to arranging.

I can’t quite remember the year but I remember the location, a wildlife sanctuary cafeteria… What a place for a life changing arranging conversation. As part of the various artist trips I organized I would often take international visitors to local attractions to really get a feel for Australian culture. And when it comes to Australia you can’t go past the amazing array of animals. 

While there, I was chatting with my good friend Drew Zaremba about his recent experiences teaching arranging at the University of Northern Colorado. He mentioned that one student surprised him by creating unique voicings purely based off of the melody of each individual line. Instead of relying on voicing shapes or including “necessary” chord tones, the student prioritized creating great melodies for each instrument. Although the concept wasn’t new to me, I had only really thought about that type of writing in the context of baroque music where Bach stretched the rules of counterpoint to generate some very modern sounding chords for the 1700s. 

Unlike some of the other revelations I’ve shared, the conversation with Drew didn’t immediately reveal how it could be of use to my situation. In fact it was only when I started writing many months, or perhaps a year or two later, that I realized I should experiment with the concept mentioned. And if you know anything about me, you know I’m always keen to try something new, especially if I feel like I’m in a creative rut.

So I did just that, I began to take the melody lines of the instruments I wrote for more seriously than the voicings I was using. Unlike the creative results that Drew’s student must’ve found to warrant our conversation, my attempts yielded far less experimental voicings and instead resulted in simpler combinations of chord tones. However, the individual parts sounded better, and you know what that means, less complaints from the bandstand! On a more serious note though, by allowing myself to think purely about melody I was able to find the passion for arranging once again. Something which I consider far more valuable.

Now it’s one thing to talk about this and another to actually show you an example. To begin with, this concept is far easier to work with if you have less instruments because it means less melodies you have to manage. When you start looking at a whole big band, the idea can be quite daunting to weave so many individual melodies on top of one another. So to keep things simple I’m going to be working with 3 lines. 

In this context I also want to clarify what I mean when I say melody. I am not thinking about each instrument having a 100% unique melody with different rhythms and moving polyphonically. Iinstead I am thinking about each line operating homophonically under one given melody line. How this approach differs from conventional methods is that we are focusing on making each instrument sound like a complete melody and not just as an inner voice of a stock voicing method. What makes this difficult is that it is hard to define what makes a good melody, so you’ll just have to be content with options that I think sound good in this instance.

Taking the first four bars of blue bossa I created two countermelodies that both sit underneath the original. For the first one I wanted to use contrary motion as a point of difference, whereas the second countermelody I wanted to lean on the darker tones of C harmonic minor, specifically the Eb and Ab and how they move between the notes a semitone/half-step away. 

I definitely lean more towards diatonic options than chromatic in my writing so the voicings between each part aren’t as dissonant as what others may come up with. However, there are some interesting results even in this example that I wouldn’t have come up with if I had approached the melody with standard voicing methods. The two that stick out the most are the C in bar 2 and the F in bar 4. Over the C I would typically voice some sort of triadic Cm voicing which had the Eb (3rd). Yet in this situation it is an open 4th sound with only the root and 5th voiced out. Looking at bar 4, it is highly unusual that I would put a 6th/13th in the bottom voice and would far more likely opt to voice out a C (5th) or Eb (7th) to better represent the chord symbol. However both work because the horizontal motion of each line justifies the choices.

Now that we’ve looked at a real example it’s time to ask the question again, is melody or harmony more important? I started my writing journey relying on melody, then I moved to a purely harmony focus, and now I find myself able to look at both options and pick what is best. For me, there simply is no correct answer but hopefully what I’ve shown is that by approaching voicings through a melodic sense you can create options you may not usually come up with. 

Thanks so much for taking the time to read this week's newsletter. If you’re sick and tired of voicings, don’t worry because next week we will be changing topics. Many of you wanted to hear about planning and developing an arrangement when I polled you in December so that’s where we are headed next. Also if you haven’t noticed, I’ve started archiving these newsletters so if you want to go back and read an old one you can click on the link at the bottom of this email. I plan on uploading them a month at a time so if you want to read any of the voicing topics from January you’ll have to wait until February before they are available on the site.

Thanks,

Toshi