From: fields@zip.eecs.umich.edu (Dr. Matt)
Subject: Re: Music composition
Organization: University of Michigan EECS Dept., Ann Arbor
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 12:12:09 GMT

In article <1992Oct13.101627.22447@ccnews.nctu.edu.tw> u7911050@cc2.nctu.edu.tw () writes:
>I've tried for many times to compose a good song.  For many times, 
>some wonderful melody (even the whole song structure) strike into my brain
>but it's always a pity that I can't organize them when I want to write
>them down. 
>
>In another situation, I wrote the melody one segment by another.
>But when it is done, I can't even connect them into a song.
>
>Anybody has a good advice for
>
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>|   E.E. Department of                ----' `---`-  `--  `--`- |   |  \|   |
>|   National Chiao Tung University   ==========================|======== / |
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Dear Saturn at Chiao Tung, Taiwan,

This is the right newsgroup for you.

Pick out some of the music that you consider the most worthy of immitating
(for me that would be the works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, but people
differ on this).  Listen to a lot of it.  What conventional phrases and
plans occur over and over again from piece to piece?  How do these conventions
help move your feelings through the music?  Can you take the enormous table
of raw materials which you have composed, and pick sections which fit your
favorite plan, then string them together?

Since in my case my model would typically be a symphony or string quartet
by Haydn, I would generate my raw material by first thinking up a little
melody that has enough odd, unique things about it that I think it will be
recognizable and identifiable in a lot of different contexts, then I generate
hundreds of variants on it, each of which has a slightly different emotional
feel but each of which is still identifiable as a form of the same melody...
including canons, invertable counterpoints, things that sound very final,
things that modulate cyclicly through keys...

Then I begin grouping them according to functions they might serve in a
sonata-allegro form, and I begin smoothing over the edges between them so
I have larger chunks of music.  Meanwhile, I get a large-scale drama and
plan that leads to a climax in my mind.

Now I proceed like a combination of top-down and bottom-up programming.
Towards the end, I usually end up adding more music, but not for any
logical reasons.

Along the way, I also decide what instruments I'm writing for, and I
make sure that I assign each player music that is appropriate for that
player's instrument or voice, and I call upon my knowledge of orchestration
to make sure that the instruments will blend in such a way that every note
will be heard clearly.

This is my procedure, in general.  As I review it, I realize that it
sounds very intellectual, but the truth is that I don't think very deeply
about what I'm doing unless I have to explain it to somebody.

At times, the material I'm working on is clearly not tonal, in which case
I play with it and find out what it does best.  Often, I discover that
I have a variety of overlapping melodies and arppegiated chords, each of
which imposes a certain amount of restrictions on the order of notes that
I'm using.  In such cases, I often discover a 12-tone row hiding underneath
my material, and once material is organized into a row (of whatever length),
I usually give up trying to impose further restrictions on its order, and
start building larger and larger phrases with it.  At the same time, I
come from the other end with a notion of the drama and rhetoric of the
piece as a whole.  Usually, I find myself using something analogous to
sonata-allegro, or rondo, or verses and refrains, as my basic plan even when
I'm working with atonal materials.

I hope you find this answer interesting.

Matthew Fields