Rhythm and melody enter into the soul of the well-instructed youth and produce there a certain mental harmony hardly obtainable in any other way. . . . thus music, too, is concerned with the principles of love in their application to harmony and rhythm.
Harmony is the third element of music, after melody and rhythm, and also the one which requires the most study to actually master. People can be very instinctive and extremely gifted melodically and rhythmically, and harmony can still be difficult.
Yoga is like music: the rhythm of the body, the melody of the mind, and the harmony of the soul create the symphony of life.
I prefer music where melody, harmony and rhythm come together and no one element overshadows the other. Jazz at its best is a democracy of creativity.
Music is basically melody, harmony, and rhythm. But people can do much more with music than that. It can be very descriptive in all kinds of ways, all walks of life.
Music creates order out of chaos: for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent, melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous.
Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality. Rhythm might be described as, to the world of sound, what light is to the world of sight. It shapes and gives new meaning. Rhythm was described by Schopenhauer as melody deprived of its pitch.
Melodies can be good depending on the context. You can have a simple melody, and if the harmony behind it is interesting, it can make a very simple melody really different. You can also have a complex melody. The more complex it is, the harder it is to sing, and then sometimes it can sound contrived. You could write a melody that would be fine on a saxophone but if you give it to a singer, it can sound raunchy.
Our bodies like rhythm and our brains like melody and harmony.
I don't like using fourths and fifths. Instead, I'll come up with a harmony line made up of major and minor thirds above the melody, then I'll drop it down an octave so that the melody is on top and the harmony line is major and minor sixths below it.
It is the melody and the rhythm that are by far the most important and then words and imagery and stuff, story bits will start to stick to a melody and that is the way I write.
Plato defines melody to consist of harmony, number and words: harmony naked of itself, words the ornament of harmony, number the common friend and uniter of them both.
Jazz is really 20th-century fusion music. You take West African harmony and rhythm, mix with European harmony, and boom!
I always write lyrics first and the rhythm and the melody come from the lyrics. It always comes from the lyrics: words have rhythm and words have melody.
I still feel like if I can get a song to work with, say, a basic beat, a rhythm, some chord changes, and a melody, a vocal melody - if it works with that, then I feel it's written and there's something there.
I consider music to be storytelling, melody and rhythm. A lot of hip-hop has broken music down. There are no instruments and no songwriting. So you're left with just storytelling and rhythm. And the storytelling can be so braggadocious, you're just left with rhythm.