In one of my music composition classes, my professor explained how we should think about the composing process. He said that there were two essential ways to conceptualize it. Top-down composing and bottom-up composing. He went on the explain that top-down composing was the concept of coming to your composition with an existing blueprint for the piece you are about to compose. Bottom-up composing, he said, was the concept of approaching your composition process with an existing theme that can be developed and gradually shaped into a complete piece of music. He later added that bottom-up composing was the superior method. I agree, and the rest of this article will be an explanation as to why this is the case.
Induction and Deduction
Top-down and bottom-up are useful terms but they aren’t as accurate as they could be; inductive and deductive are better. In logic, we use facts to build arguments. There are two kinds of facts that are relevant to this discussion, general facts and particular facts. A general fact is a fact about the world that is accepted by most people. And, a particular fact is a fact about one thing in particular; “Molly has five apples.”, for example. It can be seen then, that top-down composition is deductive. We are creating our piece of music from a general set of facts and building the blueprint that our music will conform to. And bottom-up composition is finding a particular fact, our theme, and building-out the rest of the composition from there.
An Organicist’s Conception of Musical Structure
This concept where an entire piece grows from a single seed, is the organicist paradigm. This concept, in my opinion, can become problematic because it can easily flip from being an induction process, to a deductive one. Instead of themes developing naturally, it becomes an assertion about how musical themes must exist in your musical world. All themes must come from the same seed and have a clear route of development that connects them all together. Thus, the organicist paradigm eats itself. But, if we don’t make the mistake of forcing the deductive process onto the organic development of our themes, we can safely use this concept in our inductive composing process.
The Composer’s Snowflake
There are seven branches of a composer’s craft. They are melody, rhythm, harmony, counterpoint, form, arranging, orchestration. Regardless of how deeply you delve into any one of these seven branches you will find an infinite amount of space to explore. We could picture each of these seven branches as their own snowflake. A snowflake-snowflake. The depth of music should be enjoyed and not to be perceived as a blocker.
The Centrality of Themes
The above seven branches all relate to themes. Either directly, in the case of melody, harmony, rhythm, and counterpoint. Or indirectly, through form, arranging, and orchestration. These can be thought of as ways to creatively expound on the theme you have developed. They aren’t proscriptions about how a piece of music should be structured (deductive process), these are ways you can develop your material (inductive process). As composers, we should think about the possibilities of developing our one theme instead of conforming to a paradigm.
The Problem of Conceiving of Music Abstracted From Themes
Without themes in music, it is difficult to perceive what is changing and why. For example, it is intuitive to see the connection when a theme is fragmented and imitated. If some other paradigm of musical organization (non-thematic) is used, the music is often less rhetorically effective as a result. Whenever a successful piece of non-thematic music is written, the techniques they used are never retained in subsequent successful pieces. For example, there will never be a more famous painter than Jackson Pollock, who paints in a similar style. But there were many more portrait artists after Rembrandt. One of the key characteristics of thematically driven music is that the same tropes can be used repeatedly with equally great effects in many different contexts. The concept is so fruitful that composers can use it ad infinitum. The same can’t be said for people who compose in the vein of integral serialism or new complexity, to pick on a few fruitless paradigms.
The Relative Ease of Working with Themes
When we think about structuring our efforts around themes, the process becomes much easier to work with and the result is more effective and less cliche. All of the tools you learn from your snowflake studies directly reinforce the music you’re writing, and this is a good thing! Re-inventing the wheel for every piece is stupid.