As part of my music studies, I’m gradually working through the book, Music Composition for Dummies. What makes this book so great is that it has a series of exercises at the end of each chapter which enable you to put into practice what you learn. Chapter 7 is on melody writing and the exercises at the end of this chapter asked me to write two 16 bar melodies. The first must have no melodic repeats and the second must be based around a motif of 2 to 6 notes. However, I actually took it a step further and harmonised each melody for string quartet. I didn’t like what I came up with for the long melody but thought the motif I came up with had potential, so chose to develop this when working through the rest of the exercises for the chapter.

The exercises that followed asked me to expand on these 16 bars and rework the motif again and again. As well as expanding the motif I also created a second melody which I also reworked. However, this only gave me half a piece so I decided to abandon the exercise book and do my own thing for the second half of the piece.

Here’s my end result…