Realisation

Two nights ago I had a group of four musicians over at my house playing music.  We weren't playing for rehearsal or anything; just fooling around to experiment and stuff.  Even though it wasn't a performance, and it wasn't even a serious interaction, I still came to a musical realization that is definitely worth mentioning here and applicable in some upcoming shows I have...

So, my realization came from the couple hours I spent with these people trying to play the same thing together in order to sound like a band.  I realized that a piece in a song (at it's most basic function) is a combination of rhythm and melody.  A musician must recognize these to play with another, and so it follows that in order for this to happen, the music must be rhythmically and melodically recognizable.

Rhythm: the thing that makes rhythm understandable to people is for it to be guided by a tempo.  The rhythm is a repeating phrase, each with the same number of beats in the tempo.  A rhythmic musical exclamation is known as an accent.  Accents can have different length, or value.  An accent that takes up the entire phrase is a whole note.  One half is a half note, on fourth is a quarter, on and on until it becomes difficult to play that fast.  Most of the time accents are on the tempo beat, but not always.  They can be in between the beats as well.

Melody: melodies that obey the laws of musicality follow chords and are derived from one chord, or a keynote.  A lot of melodies begin on the keynote, and a great number end on them too.  Say for example, a song was played in the keynote of C major.  It would involve combinations of notes in the C major scale- CDEFGABC.  If the song had a chord change- say, G -the melody would have to find it's way to the G note in the C scale and then direct to the G major scale- GABCDEF#G.  This is the logistics anyhow.

So, this pertains to performance in the sense of playing something that a person with no musicality can listen and groove to, just by their natural sense of rhythm and melody.  In my songs, I need to pick out a rhythm and a melody and then stick to them, at least to begin with.  The deviations will come late,r but not until the establishment of the song's source.