Melodie en Sol

When Melody and Guillaume asked me to write an original piece for their wedding processional, I was excited and eager to do so for a number of reasons. For one thing, she is my sister, after all! Also, how many aspiring composers get the chance to write a piece for somebody actually named Melody? So, while this was a unique opportunity for me, at the same time it also presented me with a unique challenge: how on earth am I supposed to write a melody for Melody with enough musical significance to match the height of emotions present on the most important day of her life? The more I thought about it, the more I decided to that the best way to write this piece was to have Melody and Guillaume do the bulk of the writing for me. Yes, that’s right. In fact, without even trying, they had already done most of the grunt work for me on this composition. Ok, maybe that’s a little misleading, but let me explain…

Throughout music history, many different composers have hid special messages or meanings within their compositions. The most notable examples of this are Bach hiding his name – B,A,C,H (B-natural) – in The Art of Fugue and Schumann hiding his name and the hometown of his fiancée in his piece, Carnaval. And so I thought, “if they can do it, why can’t I?”. I decided to use this same process in composing my piece. In fact, the melody of the processional begins with a melodic transcription of Melody’s own name. To do this, I extrapolated the musical scale from A-Z (for example: A=A, B=B, … G=G, H=A, I=B, and so on). If you apply that to the letters in Melody’s name, you get F-E-E-A-D-D. Her middle name, Joy, comes to C-A-D. The first six notes I refer to as the “Melody” theme, and the last three as the “Joy” theme. I found that when I played the “Melody” theme, it naturally split itself into two parts, F-E-E and A-D-D. The music seemed to naturally provide me with three groups of three-note thematic ideas with which to compose the entire piece. However, there were a modifications that I needed to make. First, the “Melody” theme seemed to center itself around a D minor triad. Of course, minor keys would never work for a wedding, so I simply changed the F to an F#, and the C to a C# to place the melody in the key of D Major. Second, I decided to transpose the entire melody to the key of G for obvious reasons. Those that know Guillaume well typically just call him “G” because the French pronunciation can trip a lot of people up. A third minor change was modifying the “Joy” theme from C#-A-D to C#-B-D (or F#-E-G in the new key) to make it fit better with the flow of piece.

Armed with my new thematic ideas, I set about actually composing the piece. For inspiration, I listened to Claire de lune from Claude Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque and Dirait-on by Morten Lauridsen many times to get me thinking in a “quasi-French” mode. The result was a melody of about sixteen measures length in 3/4 time. The entire piece ended up being written in a somewhat stanzaic form. The first stanza is an augmented version of the melody, which leads into a slightly faster, flowing stanza. What follows is approximately fourteen measures of transition intended to deceive the listener into thinking the key signature has changed, when it fact it hasn’t (the entire piece in is G Major). The final stanza (for the entrance of the bride) is louder and more majestic. The astute listener will also hear traces of the “Bridal Chorus” (“Here Comes the Bride”) mixed in with the main melody. The piece then ends as it began – tranquil – with traces of the “Melody” theme.

The last piece of the puzzle is the actual title of the piece. I struggled coming up with a name. All I could come up with for the longest time was “Melody in G,” but that sounded too cliché. So, I decided to say it in French (everything sounds more artistic in French, right?). So, there you have it – Melodie en Sol. I jokingly told Melody that she is the bride, the commissioner, the title, and the tune. By the same token, Guillaume is the groom and the key signature – the tonal center of the piece which provides the necessary musical environment for the melody to thrive.

So, thank you and congratulations, Melody and Guillaume. I couldn’t have done it without your help! I hope that whenever you listen to this piece in the future, it will bring back many wonderful memories of your special day.

Listen to Melodie en Sol (8MB).