Most great melodies are filled with movement. They roll up and down, with steps and leaps and bounds. Sometimes I say that with melodies, motion = emotion.

Most of the time this is true. Check out some of your favorite melodies for yourself.

But there are exceptions – great songs, or more typically, parts of songs, that move very little. Sometimes the unusual nature of that lack of motion is what brings attention to the song. (And, to partially compensate, the melodies are often complemented by clever harmonization.)

Probably the most famous song of this type is (the title gives it away) ‘One Note Samba’ by Antonio Carlos Jobim (listen below). Its melody doesn’t actually have only one note. But the Verse, or A section, has only two notes (a 4th apart), which is pretty damn impressive in the minimalism department.

But Jobim, one of the all-time great songwriters, was canny enough to know that this gimmicky approach, however brilliantly handled harmonically and rhythmically, wasn’t enough to carry a whole song. So in the B section the melody covers an octave and a fifth and goes through several keys. (Contrast: one of a songwriter’s most essential tools.)

He did something similar, though not as extreme, in what’s probably his most famous song, ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ (also below). This Verse melody uses only 6 notes, in one scale – Bb, C, D, E, F, G (if in the key of F).

That’s simple, but the harmonization is not. The melody starts with a G and an E (‘Tall and tan and young and lovely…’), but that interval of a 3rd is sung over an Fmajor chord. The melody notes are the 2nd and the major 7th of that chord. Some of the ‘tender notes’, as I call them.

Here again Jobim balances out the simplicity of his verse melody with a Bridge melody that’s uncommonly active and, for most of its length, not even tethered to any one key for more than a bar or two.

For some other examples of this ‘one note… or almost’ approach, consider John Lennon. As I wrote in a previous post:

Lennon often wrote melodies, or parts of melodies, that depended on a single note, or one note with slight variations and changing harmonies underneath – listen to the Chorus of ‘All You Need Is Love’, the Verse of ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’, the first lines of the Verses of ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, the Verse of ‘Julia’… This was a trademark of his songwriting. (Read the whole post here)

It’s sensible songwriting. If you’re going to go to one extreme in section A, go to the other extreme (but stay in context) in section B. If you listen to these songs, especially Jobim’s, with this in mind, even if you’re not familiar with his style of music you’ll hear how great these choices are (Jobim was a songwriting genius… and I don’t use that word often).

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