Have you always wanted to write your own music, but you're nervous to get started? The anxiety you feel is completely normal. As a matter of fact, it's actually a good thing. It means you care about creating a quality composition. That lands you in the winner's circle already, in my opinion! Composing, especially when you're already a music professional, can be intimidating. After helping students write well over 100 pieces, I'm still nervous every time. I've learned to embrace that and keep pressing forward.
Take a second and think about your favorite pieces. What qualities do they have? Is there a style toward which you gravitate? I love romantic era music. Chopin is my favorite piano composer followed by Clara Schumann. Her pieces are so bold!
What about your least favorite pieces? What bugs you the most about them? I really don't like unexplained or seemingly purposeless dissonance. I prefer pieces that have at least a bit of symmetry. Those of you who love post-modernism may wish to turn away for a moment.
My least favorite piece of all time is "Black Angels" by George Crumb. I had to study it for a theory course in college and it gave me nightmares (I'm not even kidding). It's chaotic, disjunct and just plain ugly. And yet, it's famous. Ewwww. I play it for students who are too hard on themselves. I wish I could show you their faces when they hear it for the first time - priceless! If you need to lighten the mood in your studio, try it out. It's led to some pretty amazing conversations about music with my students.
Now that you've identified the things you like about your favorite pieces, let's get composing! Here are two ways to get started:
Write a melody with motives
Write a soundtrack for a dramatic scene
Motives are an incredible compositional tool. My students (and their parents) seem to believe that to be a great composer, you must be able to conjure up limitless melodies and harmonies at will. That's just not true. As a music history major, I spent many hours pouring over the original manuscripts held in the special collections room of my university's music library. There was nothing spontaneous about Beethoven's work, arguably the greatest composer of Western music to have ever lived. His work was tortured and angry. He scribbled notes in the margins, aggressively crossed out sections and drew all sorts of practically illegible symbols in his scores. It took him years, sometimes decades, to compose a single score.
There is absolutely no reason why a "regular" musician can't compose a fabulous piece of their own. Even if a student has only been taking lessons for a short time, they've had years of music education through commercials, movie scores, cartoons, radio stations, even doorbells and subway chimes. This aural education is critical to their development and gives them auditory tools their fingers may not have mastered yet. It's why a child knows when a song is finished, just by hearing a cadence. They may not know what a cadence is, but they can definitely tell if it's incomplete!
Creating your motive seems so much harder than it actually is. My cat once walked across the keys and a student used that as the basis for their newest composition. It can literally be anything. You want scary - try an augmented 4th. You want lyric lines, throw a sixth in there somewhere and add a scale.
Check out this motive that Alyson wrote in her piece "Autumn Mist". The Perfect intervals in her opening motive give this piece an ethereal feel. Listen to the whole composition below. 10 out of 17 measures are based on this theme!
If you love spinning a good story, then composing a soundtrack is your key to compositional success! Margarida is the expert in this style in my studio. She's been writing music this way for six years and she blows me away every time. Her most recent piece, "Cuckoo Amid the Heliotropes" is the story of a nymph that fell in love with the Greek god, Helios. In the second section, the nymph is betrayed, illustrated with aggressive dissonance and a driving baseline. When we reach the third section, the nymph has fallen into dejection and loneliness. Eventually she is transformed into a heliotrope, a flower that tracks the path of the sun each day. I love that this piece doesn't have a closing cadence. Perhaps the story isn't over!
Composing this way is generous because you always have the audience in mind. Your music may be illustrating moments like a light going on or descending a flight of stairs. They seem unimportant, but imagine what going down the stairs into a creepy dark basement would sound like. It's musty and there are cobwebs everywhere. When you finally find the light switch, there is a huge sense of relief as the darkness vanishes. I can hear a descending line with minor and diminished intervals in my head, followed by a major chord high on the keyboard. What do you hear?
I recently heard a statistic that out of the top 100 classical pieces ever composed, Bach wrote three. Johann Sebastian Bach composed over 1100 pieces. He was undoubtedly a genius and yet only three of his compositions are in the top 100. Why, might I ask, do we expect ourselves to compose a masterpiece in our first go or our 50th for that matter?! The best thing for you to do if you want to spark your own creativity is to start! If you're too scared to write it down, start with improvisation. It's like composing, but there's no evidence afterward, which means you ARE a genius because you created something new and sent it out into the ether. GO YOU!
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