What Is Melisma in Music? If you’ve ever heard a singer stretch a single “oh” across a cascade of notes, you’ve heard melisma—the technique of singing one syllable over multiple…
At its core, a leitmotif is a compact, deliberately recurring musical or thematic idea that is permanently tied to a specific character, location, object, or abstract concept within a story.…
Stop Thinking Like a Pianist: Voicing Chords for Singers Starts With the Voice To voice chords for singers, you need to do one of two things: arrange vocal harmonies that…
Close harmony means arranging voices so that all parts stay within a narrow pitch span—usually an octave or less—while moving in tight, interdependent lines. If you want to know how…
The Fastest Path to a Real Counter Melody (And What It Isn’t) When producers ask me how do you do a counter melody, I give a blunt answer: take your…
The Fast Answer: How to Write a Renaissance Vocal Piece If you want to know how to write a renaissance vocal piece, here is the practitioner’s shortcut: pick a poetic…
A villancico is a Spanish-language poetic-musical form that began in late 15th-century Iberia as a rustic, often secular song and later morphed into the Spanish and Latin American Christmas carol…
How To Arrange A Gospel Choir Song: The Core Blueprint To arrange a gospel choir song that moves a congregation, you must abandon the static SATB block harmony mindset and…
When I first sat down with a facsimile of the Magnus Liber Organi in a graduate seminar, I realized that what is organum in music comes down to this: it…
The Short Answer: What a Descant Is If you’ve ever sung a Christmas carol and suddenly heard a soaring line above the melody on the final verse, you already know…