Morning Composition Jan 2006

Friday. I'm waiting for the Sudafed and Advil to kick in and rid me of this headache.
Don't want to think. Just want to compose.
No techniques in mind.
Just starting in Dm and writing what the piece seems to call for next.
It's about 4 minutes long.

String Rhapsody

Coasters and Freefall

It seems to me that music that affects the audience is music that makes them feel. Music can be evocative and metaphoric. It can be imagistic and calculating. It can have clever tricks. But in the end, it's not the thinking we make people do, its the feeling. When we listen to music we want an emotional adventure. Listeners want a rollercoaster of experience. But to stay on the tracks and finish the ride, the ramps and descents and curves must come at just the right point in the momentum of the trip.

So I'm thinking about the optimum pacing of new elements in each piece of music and where they fall. I'm thinking about the overall plan of each piece and making it convey the range of emotions that will fulfill the music's intent. I'm thinking of the music's structure or progression as the trellaces that support the piece at any moment, and the melody as the connecting link and ultimate track the audience rides upon. I guess it's an acute balance of structure and freedom.

So this week I'm formulaic. First, I'm writing chord progressions that convey an emotional and sonic tonality. The chords introduce opportunities the melody will use, but also confinement. My goal is fluidity within the tonality, so that from chord to chord the leap is not too abrupt. Second, I am composing the melody. While the chord structure defines much of the tone, the melody defines the actual ballistics of the ride. It contains the rhythmic patterns and the direction of travel at any given moment. Lastly, I am arpeggiating and when possible, counterpointing the bass to abide by Brahms' law of no-dull-bass. When I have my wits about me, I create breathing room in the melody so alternate voices can chime in and act like fun-house mirrors, reflecting the main melody, but with variety and distortion.

So here's an MP3 construction sample: Etude6

The progression is Dm Gm F Dbdim Dm Gm A7 Dm. Each chord gets a bar here.
First, I record the progression (8 bars). Then I add the melody (8 more bars). Next, I craft the bass (The last 8 bars). Lastly, I would add a few embellishments (also in the last 8 bars).

This is not how the piece would ultimately unfold. This is just how it's composed to insure that the components fit and that I am giving the right emphasis and freedom on the melody. When finished, perhaps, it will begin with the melody or the bass line. That becomes another discussion altogether.

What is worth noting, at least to myself, is that the melody sometimes has to pave the way for the sharper jumps in the progression. While I try to design a progression that sounds natural and creates a stable and free platform for the melody, not all the chord jumps are cozy. In these cases, the current melodic phrase can build a case for the ensuing chord jump. The transition from F to the Dbdim in this progression is not quite as smooth as some of the other jumps. Thus, to the extent that the melody over the F chord can preview the note Db, it can make the new chord flavor (Dbdim) more palatable. So, the coaster car doesn't jump off the track because the track began its deflection early enough. It keeps the thrill but avoids the doom.

Biting for Tears

So here I am back at the augmented chords. I'm trying to become more comfortable with these unwieldy beasts. The going is slow, as they are like wolves. They are strong and dangerous. They certainly have their place, I just have to find where it is, and not try to shove them just anywhere.

One place where they worked this morning is to spur greater sentimentality. As mentioned earlier they point you home to a minor root if they are used in the 5th position, e.g. a Eaug leads to Am. Usually, however you would use just the V or V7 chord. Here I am using augmented G chords to lead to Cm. They add an edginess that is more plaintive. The sample etude uses augmentation in a mournful passage with the edginess evokeing perhaps more pain. The odd note in the augmented G is the eb, and it functions as if seeding the clouds of sadness. Its added tension is the bite that, in this narrow context , allows it to work.

the sample is: www.dreamscience.net/RocuroEtude5.mp3

The progression is repeated 4 times: once simply, once with more arpeggiation, and then two more times adding a violin lead. The progression is Cm Bdim Cm Fm Gaug Cm.

On review, adding an Abdim before the Gaug may be even richer and breaks the monotony of an 8 measure pattern. If this were a tutorial, I'd break out this section into a new section and talk about when to have an even and predictable measure count and when not to. But it's not a tutorial, just an adventure in musical growth. And so some things we notice because of their neon sign, others we find partially obscured in the bushes along the road. So we keep our eyes open, huh?

Augmentation

When you write passages of music for film or theater you entitled to compose music that is free from structural demands of composing. You are, however, not free in your composition. You are stringently compelled by the emotional demands of the film's momentary sentiment. You are taking the actions displayed on the screen and representing the emotions that the filmmaker wants the audience to feel. It is in these little spurts of music and sound that you can deploy your most errant chords without concern for how they fit into a song structure. Diminshed chords and augmented chords are ideal for creating reactions of tension.

When you are composing a more structured piece of free standing music, or a more sweeping cinematic theme, you are once again bound by the traditional musical structure. It has to sound good.

I've written earlier about discovering ways to use diminished chords. Today I was searching for ways to use augmented chords to good effect. The gaps betwen the notes of a normal chord are either: skip 3 then skip 2 for a major chord or skip 2 then skip 3 for a minor chord. An augmented chord skips 3 then skips another 3 for its last note. An E augmented chord is thus comprised of e ab and c. Here's the way I discovered to use such a chord.

In a minor key, an augmented V chord can lead to the root chord with a little more mystery and color than a traditional V chord. So in the key of Am, an E aug. begs to resolve back down to the Am. It adds such coloration though that it seems better to visit the E aug early in a progression rather than to save it for just the ending. A progression exemplifying this usage is in the accompanying music file.

Augmented E

Here, the chord progression is Am Eaug Abdim Am Dm Eaug Am Am.
The music file has the pogression played once as simple chords and a second time more melodically arpegiated.

Someday, perhaps, I'll figure out useful ways to use augmented chords for Major keys. Meanwhile, I'll keep experimenting and applying my discoveries into music.

The Down Side of Up

It's always seemed easier to compose in minor keys than major keys. The minor flavor imparts an air of seriousness that makes a work seem more weighty. I remember, in my youth, playing on relentlessly in minor keys after my father had had a stroke, and my grandmother came in and told me I had to change the music I was playing. She said it sounded like a funeral dirge. Well, I stopped playing rather than change my style. It just seemed right. Even in Rock music, minor keys make for more serious tunes, and there's nothing a musician wants more than to be taken seriously.

I keep a notebook of my classical music ideas. I have a copious list of minor chord progressions that I might go to when I start writing. I have compiled the list from hours and hours of trying as many sequences as possible. My notebook includes main themes, turn-arounds, endings, nexts (what comes after a theme), modulations and some chord alternates.

When I started this 2 years ago, I had dozens of minor progressions before I even started major progressions.

Enlightenment

I knew I would need some major key progressions. At least, I thought it would be a good exercise. I think the first one that sounded good to my ear was C G G7 C. Simple and classical. I thought there might not be very many more. I have spent 18 months working on the list and it is now longer than the minor progression list. I listened to Mozart and heard how much he wrote in major keys. Now, if it's good enough for Mozart, it's certainly good enough for me. He is, after all, my dead mentor.

What really set the major keys working for me was the introduction of diminished chords. I discussed these a few logs ago. They make a major key piece of music sound rich and serious. They provide a coloration to music that opens things up. They are like coffee or beer. The first time you try them they taste bad. Eventually you cultivate a taste for them.

But it wasn't just diminished sounds that made that major keys work. Here's the crux of today's log: it is the power of the minor chords that come into a piece in a major key. When I've developed a theme in a major key and then move to minor keys either as a new pattern or as a modulation, the depth and seriousness is profound. It's like a person goofing around and getting hurt. It's like a slap in the face. It's a contrast effect that can't appear if you start off in a minor key. It's the down side of up, and it's got punch.

So this morning I took out my notebook of major key ideas and composed this work for a string quartet. I know very little about arranging, but I know how to listen. Indeed, the composition took a fraction of the time; breaking the parts into different instrument voices for notation was laborious. I've got to streamline this somehow.

www.dreamscience.net/QuartetFantasia1_13_2006.mp3

Anyway, you'll see it's a major-key piece with several contrast sections with minor tonality.
If you wonder what I compose and record with, I'm using older gear: Korg N1, Digital Orchestrator recording software, and DbPower Amp to encode the piece as an MP3. For notation I use Finale 2001. (I will probably re-record using my Garritan Personal Orchestra samples, but it is not a quick and easy process and I haven't really put it to the test yet.)

This piece is a dedication to my retiring executive director, Nancy Sherman. She is a former flutist. (Oh, yeah, as you can see I don't say blog and I don't say flautist).

A Blade through the Chaos

What should become apparent to anyone reading this is that my self-guided journey is chaotic at best. I have no instructor but experience, reason and the embedded instruction that must be teased out of great pieces of music I listen to. So if, like me, you are teaching yourself classical composition, this log is not likely to give you security of knowing where you are at any moment on the path. That doesn't bother me. I'm OK embracing the mystery of what insights may lay ahead. The inviting quality of mystery keeps us engaged and intrigued. And that's a good feeling to approach creative learning with.

So today I'm thinking about runs. They are uneasy blades that carve through a piece adding cascades of melody. But blades can cut both ways. Runs can shift a melody and take it to an edge where it simply falls off. The run of notes can become an exercise for the pianist or violinist that detracts from the core of the song.

When a run goes for too long, it is commonly in repeated 16th notes and we could lose a sense of the melodic rhythm. What we do get is a sense of the pulse rhythm. Because of its repetitive quality, an extended series of runs can clear the rhythmic pattern and (while exhausting the audience's melodic ear) it resets the audiences rhythmic ear. It's a strange concept, too many notes can actually be cleansing.

In a related vein, I watched the film Amadeus last night. There is a scene when the emperor(?) describes his music as having "too many notes".

It's not really a good film. It made Mozart out to be an arrogant, drunken and disrespectful young man. This is because it cast Mozart from the viewpoint of a jealous rival, Salieri. It would be great to see him from the viewpoint of his relationship with Haydn: two enormous musical geniuses who esteemed each other to no end. It could sample from his works that soar more majestically and capture greater depth of character. The poor guy lost 4 of his 6 children, at birth or by the age of 1. Two of his sons survived into adulthood. One, Franz, was a composer and conductor throughout Europe, by the way.

Now imagine my surprise this morning when I see that the british released today an online book of Mozart's that lists most of his last great works, with annotations about the work and its commissioner. He includes the first 2 lines or so of each piece. It can be found at:

Mozart's Notebook

I found nothing particularly readable or useful in it. Perhaps it is inspiring just to witness writing in his own hand.

So back to runs. Runs represent a change-up. They trigger a release. They clear the rhythm pallatte. They need not be melodically dull. If a run is a diatonic step-down from one note to another, it certainly doesn't need to be a conventional staircase. In fact, I've noticed that I have to listen very carefully to detect when the staircase is broken or convoluted. For example, A run down from C to an octave lower, can often sound like an even staircase when it contains a blip. I will use small letters to indicate notes, capitals indicate chords. Try playing:
c b a g f e d c straight down, fast. Now do the same thing with the g repeated an extra time. When played fast it is hard to detect the blip, but it can make for a more melodic package in the end. Especially in that it breaks the run into an even numbered cadence (two 4-note sections).

But what is fun to play with are the myriad beautiful staircases of runs that can lead from one note to a lower or higher note. It can be both an intellectual puzzle and an artistic delight.

Here is a sample etude I wrote a few minutes ago. It has a simple run in C major, but note the tiny jumps at the end to make ending on c the timely punchline for the run. I've also added an interesting turn at the end. Where it may be conventional to wrap up a section with I V I, or here C G C, I am using a C F C. But to give it greater resolution the F is actually a Dm played over an F in the Bass.


The mp3 file is: Etude3

And that's my adventure today.

Diminishing Returns

A year and a half ago I was telling someone how unimportant diminshed chords were for music. Indeed, in Rock music, people very seldomly use diminshed chords. Today, you could have a very profitable career in music and never use a diminished chord.

Now I know better.

In classical music, diminshed chords are among the most useful chords I know. And this past year has been my experimenting with them to the point of exhaustion.

A chord is simply the sounding of notes simultaneously. A major chord has gaps between the notes. A minor chord has a different configuration of gaps (Skipped notes) between the played notes. And a diminshed chord has yet a different configuration of gaps between the sounded notes. These configurations set the mood of a section of music.

Mood means a lot.

From my perspective mood and melody are the pillars of good music. Ignore either and the roof falls in.

So, as I said, I have been exploring how to use these chords to create music that is rich in mood and flavors. The chords or harmony of the piece provide the platform upon which the melody can be built. Crummy platform, crummy melody.

The delight that stems from diminished voicings (chords) is that they can be used all over the place. here is a link to a study I wrote this morning to demonstrate the wholesale use of diminished voicings. The piece is in the key of C major. The diminished chords are all very similar and all include the notes B, F, D, & Ab:

http://www.dreamscience.net/RocuroEtude1.mp3

Every 2nd or 3rd chord is a diminished chord, though I fragmented the chords a bit to create melody.

The diminished chords open up the possibilities of the piece in that they add coloration. I look at that as "surface area". The more surface area to the piece, the more directions I can spin-off.

Now, a simpler and more measured use of the diminished chords is to replace the V chord. If the song is in the key of C , the fifth chord (V) would be a G. At the end of a passage it is common to signal to the listener that we are wrapping up that section by playing a little turn-around of I V I, in the key of C that would be C G C. The G can be replaced by a B diminished chord to add more flavor.

This is illustrated in the second clip:

http://www.dreamscience.net/RocuroEtude2.mp3

This clip is the same passage ending either with a IVI turn-around or a I viidim I turn-around. Fun, huh?

Its gets more exciting when you hold that diminished chord before returning to the root chord (C) and play a bass or contrabass climb through the 4 notes that make up the diminshed chord.

Now I know better.

Rocuro

Islands and Dead Mentors

"No man is an island", said John Donne.

I am.

At least that's how I feel about composing classical music. I can't find a connection with composers that compose modern classical music. There are some students out there trying to cobble together some notes in an academic pursuit to demonstrate their adoption of harmonic "rules". There are some groups of writers who write for film and TV. But even they don't spend much time comparing notes or building a composing network. They do chat about how to find jobs.

So, I compose classical music. And I feel like I'm out here alone.

I live in San Diego, California. I'm about 10 minutes from the beach, but right now it's winter and the beach is cold and solemn. I work for a non profit organization helping families and children with relationship problems. I work part-time, so I keep at least a day free to work on music, and because I go in to work at noon, I have most mornings free. Perfect for a composer. Enough work to pay the most of the bills and enough freedom to compose and record. Now all I need is someone to bounce ideas off. Anybody out there?

This is a log of what I am thinking and putting together at any given moment.
I guess this log has a sound track, for I might as well post music as I write it so people know where I am coming from.

This log begins with the reflection that everybody who composes music wants to be liked.

Mozart. Beethoven. Even Bach. Well maybe not so much Bach. On occasion he composed because it was a grand intellectual adventure. After reaching popularity, many composers shift their attention to security and receiving pay for their efforts. But certainly we began by wanting to be liked.

The same is true for actors and painters. The same is true for so many others.

You might deny it, but most creative people want to reveal themselves and stand out.

As composers, we compose to impress people and we want them to like us in return. Sometimes they like us even if they aren't impressed by us. Sometimes they are impressed by us and yet they don't like us. Sometimes, as advertised, we impress them and they like us.

Our compositions will be designed to impress the people we care about. As I have said I am fairly isolated. No one I know, personally, composes classical music. Virtually no one I know likes classical music. And no one seems to be buying classical music.

My Dead Mentor

I am simple. I like Mozart. He is, if anything, my mentor. My dead mentor.
I can listen to recordings and learn something. That's good. Admittedly, I get no explanation or encouragement but I get good examples from him.

Academics might not like Mozart so much. In college, it was all about unusual and (for me unlistenable) modern classical composers. When I question myself, I ask, Am I missing something. Am I going in the wrong direction. I asked a professor of music at USC "If a Beethoven were to come today, would he be cast off as old and irrelevant?" He said, "Probably."

Well, as I have said, I am an island. I'm not in contact with academia. Or anyone else for that matter. So when I want to be liked I don't compose for my colleagues or professors. I compose for people out there, suffused throughout the world, that might still buy classical music. Wherever they might be.

So I went online to find out which classical composers were most popular. Here's what I found at http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical. I found a list of composers and how many unique recordings were made of their works. This is informative. Because recording is a business and it is driven by sales, the consumers ultimately define what gets recorded. That's what I needed to know.

When I rearrange the list based upon number of recordings made, here's what I got:

The top 20 composers arranged based on number of recordings:

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (4,901)
Bach, Johann Sebastian (4,400)
Beethoven, Ludwig van (3,780)
Verdi, Giuseppe (2,580)
Schubert, Franz (2,491)
Brahms, Johannes (2,458)
Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilyich (2,382)
Handel, George Frideric (1,921)
Schumann, Robert (1,703)
Mendelssohn, Felix (1,687)
Chopin, Frédéric (1,679)
Puccini, Giacomo (1,614)
Debussy, Claude (1,552)
Vivaldi, Antonio (1,446)
Dvorák, Antonín (1,405)
Liszt, Franz (1,401)
Haydn, Franz Joseph (1,363)
Rossini, Gioacchino (1,244)
Bizet, Georges (1,228)
Ravel, Maurice (1,218)

Not a big surprise. Based on this list, I think I have picked the right mentor. I also conclude that what audiences (consumers) like is melody.

Note the connections: Bach preceded and helped Hayden. Hayden helped Mozart and Beethoven. Beethoven thought Handel was the cat's meow. Brahms considered himself in the top 4 with Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Pretty close. What I see is that the interconnection between these composers was dramatic. Even spanning three lengthy musical periods (Baroque, Classical, Romantic), they found a common connection and admiration. Modern classical composers are not on the list. Will they be? I think only those who become enjoyable for audiences.

So this log will be about me learning what I can through experimentation and gleaning insights from melodic masters like Mozart. I guess there will be something about life in here as well...things that might connect me with you. Come join me on the island every now and then.

Rocuro