How many attempts have been made to define the concept of melody? It is not our intention here to add another new and undoubtedly limited one to those already current. For we can assume that any definition of melody is related to our general musical attitude. How very different must the concept of melody be, or must have been, among peoples living beyond or before Western polyphony, in comparison for instance to the ideas of our nineteenth- century forefathers! Jean-Jacques Rousseau anticipated that century when he wrote: ‘Melody arises from harmony.’ And however much those same forefathers focused their expressive urge on the melodic, the indispensable basis for melody was nonetheless formed by harmony.

The disintegration of this harmonic system, however, brought one consequence: the melodic element began to collapse and was thus in need of revision. Classical period form, for example, was replaced immediately by melody moving more freely in relation to metrical nuclear points, harmonic cadences and symmetrical structures.

A far more important outcome was that the melodic element slowly but surely became primary, a development which was often misunderstood. This is not to say that musical expression became even more concentrated on the melodic than it had been before, but that the melodic, or more generally the melic element, began to play the same structural role as that previously assigned to harmony. For many composers it became a constructive factor of great significance.

Once more, it was the dodecaphonic world which applied this most thoroughly. The structural principle that emerged was exactly the opposite of its predecessor: the melic element – a succession of notes – came to determine much of the construction and sequence of the vertical sound.

But elsewhere too, the constructional role of the melic element came to the fore in many shapes. We must bear in mind, however, that the disintegration into elements that typified all developments of the past one hundred and fifty years also applied to the strictly melodic. Melodies became motifs, motifs in turn could be reduced to intervals (or incidentally even to single notes), and from these small units larger structures were determined.