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Post by Zi on Jan 31, 2023 18:14:48 GMT
Has anyone here composed anything? We had to compose little rhythms and things for Grade 1 theory but I don't remember being asked to do more than that. Some of my recorder tutor books asked me to compose simple tunes using a restricted numbers of notes. But nothing that would really be described as 'music'.
Please don't angst too much. I'm just curious. I wonder how composers go about it really...
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Post by keff on Feb 1, 2023 7:55:46 GMT
Very occasionally I will meander around the keyboard looking for a tune but never find one because of lack of rhythmic or note interval structure. Tend to think that a composer needs some sort of 'idee fixe'. When it comes to making things up I have little imagination which is the reason for going down the science route or doing things that are achievable by applying simple rules. No angst involved it is just the way it is.
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Post by pavane on Feb 1, 2023 10:05:27 GMT
I've never sat down and composed a piece of music from scratch purely as an "act of composition". I've done some theory of music courses and for one of them the final exam included a section where you were given a short verse (4 lines as I recall) and you had to set it to music, so I suppose technically that was composition. I passed but it was really about structure, getting the right sort of cadence in the right place and so on, I doubt if the tune would have won any awards. I've also done various sorts of harmonising, eg given a melody line, fill in the other parts of a traditional SATB score, or writing out a realisation of a figured bass.
Composing used to be one of my dreams but I don't have, and never will have, either the creativity or the skill set. Imagine composing material for, say, the brass section when you have never in your life played a brass instrument?
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Post by keff on Feb 1, 2023 10:39:19 GMT
I'm afraid I don't know what figured bass is.
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Post by Zi on Feb 1, 2023 10:50:27 GMT
I'm afraid I don't know what figured bass is. I didn't know either so I looked it up on wiki en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figured_bassI always know when I'm out of my depth - it's when the explanation needs an explanation and I have to read it several times before I get it. But like Feynman I believe I can't understand something if I can't explain it well so I point you to wiki and I think Pavane has a few more grades in theory than I have! Or he's had more of a life... I'm presuming all those figures and things mean something to the pianist (for example) like the indication of trills are meant to mean something to the recorder player whereas this recorder player just leaves them out working on the assumption if the composer can't be bothered to write them in then I can't be bothered to play them! It mentions the basso continuo which I do understand because it was so prevalent in recorder music. I felt all smug then.
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Post by pavane on Feb 1, 2023 10:54:37 GMT
Lots of baroque (and earlier I think) composers just put a number under the staff; it indicated a chord which a keyboard player was expected to improvise an accompaniment around. Modern editions often have "realisations" instead where someone has written out a possible bass line based on the chord sequence provided by the composer.
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Post by pavane on Feb 1, 2023 11:13:40 GMT
I think Pavane has a few more grades in theory than I have! Or he's had more of a life... Just the theory grades!
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Post by Zi on Feb 1, 2023 12:02:50 GMT
It's the how they put stuff together without having played a whatever, that puzzled me too. Some composers for the recorder quite obviously knew what it could do and avoided what it couldn't. Sibelius appears to have no regard at all for violinists. And I don't think either Wagner, Mozart, Orff or Jeremy Soule care about what it is reasonable to ask a human voice to do. Liszt quite clearly thought everyone could play piano as well as he could and I'm not sure what went through Grieg's head at all! I know that Borodin got help with the orchestration to Prince Igor because there's a story about them hanging the stuff on the line to dry! Van Eyck was blind so presumably someone had to write it down for him and then play it back... a bit like Milton with Paradise Lost.
Mr Z says he thinks they don't all work in the same way. Some start off with an idea and tinker about say on the piano. But Beethoven must have been able to hear it all in his head towards the end.
I just find it astounding that a human being can do that. Oral poetry is amazing until you realise the mechanics of it and then it's still impressive but definitely doable. So maybe there's some more formulaic approach once you have a melody... I don't know. Presumably anyone with a music degree had a chance to study composition so learned some ways of dealing with the complexity. Or maybe some people's minds just work like that... It's still impressive whatever the explanation!
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Post by evergreen on Feb 1, 2023 14:22:18 GMT
I don't have any original music in my head at all, which I would think is an essential requirement if you're a composer. I know that Borodin got help with the orchestration to Prince Igor because there's a story about them hanging the stuff on the line to dry! I'm so sorry to lower the tone, but when I read that, the 1940s song "We're gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line" flashed through my head Well you did want to know what my guilty pleasures were, and 1940s music is amongst them (although still not quite vintage, in my reckoning )
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Post by pavane on Feb 1, 2023 15:41:28 GMT
I've got a couple of wind-up gramophones and mostly 30s records but some of the wartime ones which are probably 1940s
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Post by Zi on Feb 1, 2023 16:29:02 GMT
My husband's guess at 'vintage' is Hoagy Carmichael! Is this turning into one of those stream of consciousness threads? I looked at some courses on composition but they didn't explain what the syllabus was so I thought maybe I'd buy a book...
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Post by corenfa on Feb 1, 2023 19:23:50 GMT
I did an academic music degree and that involved quite a lot of composition. I can't tell you what others' composition process is, but this is roughly mine.
I have always had musical ideas floating around in my head, I remember having these since being a single digit age. They're just always there in the background- I always have music of some sort running through my head, so these make up part of my constant background soundtrack.
When I was composing I'd sit at the piano and sketch things out to see how the harmonies and lines worked. I had no idea about style back then (as in not sure what my own style was), so I just wrote what I thought sounded nice. If I had to write something like a four part harmony exercise then there wasn't a great deal of creative freedom allowed because of the rules, so I just followed the rules. If we had something more interesting like setting a poem to song, I might play with some musical ideas and known tropes, like I once set Bilbo's Last Song from LOTR (http://www.tolkien.cro.net/talesong/lastsong.html) and for that theme of farewell, I picked the Lebewohl theme (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Sonata_No._26_(Beethoven) ). I've no idea if anyone "got it" but I didn't particularly care, I just liked the symbolism.
In general, I can't just hear the entire piece in my head then write it down- I have to mess around to see where the ideas take me. I may play snippets of it to myself and then join them all up together. Often I'll have a general idea of what it should sound like but the details escape me and I have to work really hard to transcribe it. I note that this is my thought process for anything that I do, including programming which is my day job. I often know how I want something to work but figuring out the details takes ages. I guess this is the same as technique in any field- technique to me is being able to execute what it is you had in mind. Be it performing on an instrument, drawing or other visual art, composition, programming, or cooking.
It was harder when it wasn't for piano or even anything tonal. We once had to write a percussion suite, and my inspiration for that was the sound of my grandmother's dripping tap. My grandmother lived in a village in Asia and she had a large tiled cistern in her bathroom with a dripping tap. The semi-rhythmic sound of the tap dripping into the half full cistern echoing in the tiled bathroom just caught my ear. I kept the basic rhythm of the drip (it wasn't completely regular because of waves in the cistern and irregular water flow) and the pitch of it in the main theme which was done on temple blocks, and the rest of the suite was just variations on that rhythm and pitch sequences.
In my final year of undergraduate study we had to write for orchestra. Of course the biggest challenge was trying to hear all the voices when they couldn't all be played by me on the piano, and I'm old enough that we didn't have great computer options the. It helped to know all the ranges of the instruments- fortunately due to being a music geek all my life I'd memorised these but some of my classmates ended up writing things that were unplayable. I still messed up anyway, I wrote something for harp that was too low and had to move it to celeste.
So the thing that was hard to figure out was the relative volumes of the instruments. Like how many strings do you need to counterbalance one bassoon, that kind of thing. But it was the best feeling in the world when the college orchestra played our pieces and we got to see what we got right- I'm pleased that some of the choices I made turned out exactly as how I heard it "in my head".
The final result can be heard below:
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Post by Zi on Feb 1, 2023 19:50:13 GMT
corenfa thank you so much for explaining all that and for sharing the very beautiful music. We are both in awe here. I want to read what you've said again and digest it some more and listen again. But I really do want to say thank you! I know nothing about the production of music and you've made it less distant - I can sort of see how it might emerge!
I can imagine how you must have felt listening to it played when you heard that applause too! What a wonderful experience!
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Post by corenfa on Feb 1, 2023 19:58:36 GMT
Thanks / you're welcome... when I first heard it I also got the other side of it, which is to hear the things that absolutely didn't work at all. I was aiming for some sort of Baroque-style counterpoint in the first part, but there is something off about the balance of it.
So the programmatic explanation of the piece is that it's after a "modern myth" - Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock. In this book there is a group of warriors who make a deal with some sort of god, where they get bailed out in return for selling their souls or something like that. Basically at any point in the future the god comes to collect- they have to leave the land of the living and go on quests and become characters in a story. So the end of the piece with the very bare pizzicato / col legno orchestration of the original theme, is meant to signify this.
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Post by corenfa on Feb 1, 2023 19:59:34 GMT
(and if anyone here is a science fiction / fantasy buff - I really highly recommend Robert Holdstock)
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