From: jsturges@iastate.edu (Jason L Sturges)
Subject: Re: Music composition
Summary: ideas of music composition 
Keywords: music, composition, how?
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, IA
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 22:38:33 GMT

 The information in the previous article about Music composition (807 from
fields) is quite good but may be hard to understand.  You've only been playing
for 1 - 2 years, and you're doing music composition?  That's quite impressive.

 This is a little more simplistic - it's personal for me, and may not work
for everyone.  But I'd like to share it in hope that it's helpful for you, or
perhaps someone else.  Everyone seems to ask "How do you compose music?"  
Well, here it goes!

 I guess I'll share a little bit of what I do when I compose (piano solos and 
multi-layer new age synthesizer music).  The hardest thing for me was that
when I started taking lessons (organ) I never worked with ad-lib or what-
notes-go-together exercises.  I was completely ignorant about the keyboard.
I was given sheet music and I learned it.  I was helpless at a keyboard if
I didn't have any music to guide me thru the many keys.  

 Some years later I began to be interested in music composition.  How did I
go about it?  I tried the Mozart attempt - get an idea in your head and try
to write it down without ever touching a piano.  When you get an idea in 
your head, the next hardest thing is trying to put it onto the paper.  
I simply could not do this.  I heard the melody in my head, but could not
place it on the keys.  

 So, 11 years later, after giving up composition thinking I wasn't capable of
it, I began a different type of practicing.  No longer in music lessons, I 
had to produce my own music, and my own technical studies.  I began to work
with the keyboard - seeing what keys went with what keys.  Experimenting
with chords - major, minor, demented, everything imaginable, and then seeing
what chords went with what chords, and how I could do progressions.  I began
to understand the keyboard - this simple concept of half steps and whole
steps was alien to me.  Now that I understood the keyboard I could place
the melodies in my head onto the keyboard without sitting and hunting and
pecking and failing miserably.  So my number one suggestion is to really
know your keyboard - and with that, your chords, and progressions and ALL
keys so you never have to wonder which notes are right.  If you know your
keysignature, you know which notes fit into your music - that doesn't mean
you can't change it, that's where the magic of composition happens, but it
will guide you thru the melody and helps drastically with ad-lib.

 I guess that the second thing I would suggest comes in your head when you're
thinking the melody.  I don't know about you, but when I started thinking out
melodies and tones in my head, sometimes I was just thinking rhythms and 
not the actually pitch.  I mean, I was imagining where the note was, but I 
wasn't hearing it.  This is really hard to describe.  Try this: think a melody
in your head... can you tell which notes go up and which notes go down from 
the previous?  Do you hear the pitches change, or are you just pulsating the
rhythm and thinking some imaginative magic note over and over again?  If you
try this, you may understand what I mean.  If you're sitting at the keyboard
lost with your melody, you definitely know what I mean.  So, just don't hear
your melody being played.  Take each individual note and listen to each pitch.
Hear it's placement exactly and relate it to other notes.  If you can't hear
the melody exactly as it is in your head, you'll never find it on the keyboard
no matter how hard you try.

 Now that you've got the two most important elements down, it's time to apply
them.  Sit at your keyboard with the melody you've thought up and loose
yourself in it.  Music is emotion (at least for me) expressed in tones.  Start
out with your melody and let your thought do the rest.  You will find your-
self automatically placing notes and doing progressions without even thinking 
about it.  The music will come out being you and original.  Just remember what
you're doing and write it down.  Recording your adlib session is helpful also
in case you're forgetful.

 I suppose this last step is the hardest (or, at least, the most vague) -
it comes with time.  I imagine your do this unconsciously after a while.

 One more important thing - never sit there are say "I'm not leaving this
piano until I come up with a composition."  This attitude never works.  
Some morning I get up really wanting to write, but it doesn't come out, so I
wait until it does.  Sometimes it's later in the day, or sometimes I have
to wait until tomorrow.  At the most extreme, sometimes I'm out of it
for a week or so.  You must feel imspired naturally, and not make threats.

 I hope this article is help or ideas to someone and not a waste of network
bandwidth.  Just wanted to contribute my two cents to the world of composition.

							-- Jason Sturges