Writing Instrumental Music: It's the Motif that Gives it Life

by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website.

________________________

With Gary Ewer’s songwriters’ e-books you can discover how your lyrics can make a connection with the listener, how to create chord progressions, how melodies should be contoured, and more. And you’ll get tons of chord progressions you can use right now.

For $37, purchase and download all 6 songwriting e-books.
________________________

A motif is a short musical element, like a rhythmic idea, a fragment of melody, or some other such musical bit. The purpose of a motif in a song is to help give a song structure. Joni Mitchell’s goreous album, “Shine” opens with a beautiful track, “One Week Last Summer“, an instrumental work that demonstrates how a very simple rhythmic motif can be a crucial element in getting the listener from the beginning to the end of the track.

“One Week Last Summer” is a light instrumental with jazz-infused chords with mainly acoustic instrumentation. It makes great use of alto sax, and the English horn and bassoon add a lovely sense of melancholy.

But it takes more than beautiful instruments well played for a track to work. If you are thinking of delving into the world of instrumental composition, you need to use a musical motif.

In one way, a motif is a like a hook. It’s simply a recurring idea around which a song is based. The difference, though, is that a hook is very obvious and memorable, while a motif operates more in the background.

“One Week Last Summer” starts with a seemingly unimportant “long note-short note” rhythmic motif. But the rhythmic idea keeps coming back over and over again. It’s distinctive enough that it becomes an important structural element for the song. And like all good motifs, the idea develops. Starting at 1′ 59″, a second theme of sorts is introduced that is also comprised of this same long-short rhythmic motif, but this time, the motif is presented double-time.

As the original theme returns, the original rhythmic treatment also returns.

What’s so great about this kind of instrumental composition is that the musical ideas are subtle. The themes, as such, are not designed to be memorable for their melodic content. “One Day Last Summer” is obviously intended to be more about the mood it conveys than the melody. So even more so, it is important to give the piece some sort of “glue” that will allow it to stick together and work as a composition.

Motifs do not just exist in instrumental music. They are vital components of any song, and their presence can keep a song from being boring. This is why songs that feature a guitarist simply strumming away on the chords of a song can be the kind that fade from people’s memories so quickly: there is no motif of any sort to make it interesting.

And one last point about motifs: Rhythmic motifs are very important, but melodic motifs are just as vital. Find melodic shapes of two or three notes in length that you can use as structural elements in your songs.

__________________________

To learn more about writing great songs, try Gary Ewer’s songwriting e-books.