Developing a method for teaching music composition has always been a white whale for composers. The traditional wisdom being that music composition is an inborn talent and isn’t something that can be taught. I think it’s true that musical talent is God-given and that teaching music composition is impossible, but that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to build tools that make it easier to reason about how to compose music. Teaching can best be thought of as establishing a basis for the student that they can then use to extrapolate from. The idea is to give the student tools that they can use to develop their musical material into compelling musical compositions. An emphasis on tools and techniques gets the composition student out of the formal approach to composition pedagogy using models and rules, and moves them into a more creative framework.
Fundamentals
The fundamentals of music can be thought of as: melody, rhythm, harmony, counterpoint, form, texture, orchestration, and arranging. All of these things should be studied in the traditional way. But, could there be a different approach that reduces the amount of study required? Could a framework be constructed that allows for a composition student to quickly compose music of artistic merit, without mindlessly following models? It seems to me that the study of music being such an arduous task disallows students, and even sometimes professionals, from feeling spontaneous and creative. The point of composing music is to enjoy it, and to share that enjoyment with other musicians, performers and music-lovers. Now, we can get rid of the seven fundamentals of music, at least for starters, and establish a new framework for teaching music composition.
Ideas
The most essential concept in music composition is the idea. Ideas are the trickiest concept to reason about because they don’t actually exist in a piece of music. Ideas seem to exist in the platonic realm somewhere in an idealized form. But, in the actual music on the page a given idea can appear in many different guises and should develop and change as the piece develops and changes. The main tool I use for simplifying the concept of musical ideas is to compare a set of musical ideas to the main characters of a novel. In a well-written novel the main characters will seem noticeably distinct from one another and ideally your main characters should experience some kind of transformation or development as the plot progresses. A sure-fire heuristic for discerning the maturity of a composer is to see whether or not the structure and development of their ideas makes sense. When a piece feels cobbled together and the ideas don’t make sense, I call it Frankenstein Music. The composer has failed to structure their piece properly and has instead sewn together body parts belonging to distinct people in an attempt to create life!
Constrast
Contrast in a musical composition is an essential device. Without contrast there can be no relationship or development in a piece of music. The piece will exhibit a terrible sameness. Without difference there can’t be art. A good way to think about contrast in a piece of music is to look for double bars. In a well composed piece the composer will have thought about where the double bars should be placed, and all of the double bars will be meaningful in some way. Sometimes double bars show up at tempo or meter changes, but they are best used to delineate contrasting sections of music. A well-composed section of music has well-defined contours that are made possible by contrast. A good way to think about it is to see contrast as the primary way to draw lines between the various elements of your composition.
Cycles
Music comes from nature. And, nature often exhibits cycles. You can find musical cycles in all of the seven fundamentals of music listed above. But, to simplify for the purposes of this pedagogical exercise, we can just think about rhythmical cycles. When a bar of music is subdivided according to its meter, we will find some number of subdivisions. How many ways are there of grouping the subdivisions of a meter? Well, normally rhythmic beats are grouped into twos and threes. So, in 4⁄4 we can think about it as four groups of two eighth notes, or two groups of 3 eighth notes and one group of two eighth notes. How many ways are there of grouping the double subdivision of 4⁄4, meaning, how many ways can you group 16? And, what about the quadruple subdivision of 4⁄4? And, so on… –but what if we break the frame that we’re using? Why should our reasoning about subdivision be constrained to one bar? How many ways are there to offset and re-group 10 bars of 4⁄4? Well, given the very simple procedures I’ve laid out here, we are already moving towards an infinite number of permutations even in this very constrained exercise. Cycles are a great tool for reasoning about music. Now that we have established a basic procedure for applying cycles to rhythms and rhythmic sequences, how would you extrapolate and apply the concept of cycles to the other six fundamentals of music?
Dissonance
Dissonance is a technical term, though its meaning has been distorted by attempts to redefine it in modern times, its meaning could be thought of as being synonymous with what is called a suspension today. Though the rigorous application of dissonances in the manner of Bach isn’t necessary for this pedagogical method, it’s best to have a thorough grounding in harmony for the sake of musical nourishment. For the sake of this method though, we could loosen the concept and allow for unprepared dissonances, called appoggiaturas, and loosen the necessity of all dissonances to resolve to a consonance downward by step. Dissonances in practice (includes appoggiaturas) don’t require resolution, in fact, unresolved dissonances are a key aesthetical device that modern composers use. It’s important to understand that the application of dissonances to harmony and to lines doesn’t change the fundamental harmony, it only elaborates what’s already there. It’s important to understand that dissonances can apply to any voice of your contrapuntal or chorale texture, including the bass. The vast majority of complex harmony in the repertoire can be traced back to simple enharmonic cycles, respellings, and appoggiaturas.
Resonance
Counterpoint and orchestration are opposites, and together they help to demonstrate our last concept, resonance. In orchestration, we systematically apply resonance to best express our musical intent. In counterpoint we systematically avoid resonance to better maintain the separation of the lines. A simple way to think about it is that if you want more resonance you can just add octaves, fourths or fifths to a given line. You will find this technique in artful piano music that has an orchestrated feeling. For example, look at Debussy’s piano music to find countless examples of his application of resonance to great aesthetical effect. In counterpoint, we avoid parallel perfect intervals, meaning when two lines move together in perfect intervals (fifths, fourths, and octaves). The reason we avoid this in contrapuntal and harmonic exercises is not because it sounds bad or is somehow wrong, but because a voice is dropped from the texture. The lower voice becomes subordinate to the line that it’s doubling.
Teaching students how to compose music is impossible in the same way that teaching any hard-skill is impossible. Valuable skills can only be developed by disciplined study and through acquisition of hard-earned experience. I can’t teach you how to compose, but I can teach you how to think about composing.