Posts Tagged ‘composition pedagogy’

A student’s question

Tuesday, August 26th, 2014

I’ve been teaching composition to a very talented young man, Cooper Wood for not quite two years now.  This week he discovered Varese, and emailed me with a question:  

I’ve been doing a lot of listening to 20th century composers recently because I want to liberate myself from composing invariably in a tonal idiom. I’ve been listening to Antheil, Cowell, Varesé, and Hovannes [sic]. I love the sound all of them have, but every time I try to compose non tonally I get stuck and fall back on tonalism. When and how did you sort of break free from tonalism and started relying on other parameters of music to compose?

Here’s my response:

Boy, this is a big question.

We’ve never really talked about how I got going in composition. My junior year of high school, I had a free period and didn’t want to take a study hall, so my guidance counselor suggested our school’s gifted and talented program, in which about twenty of us pursued our own interests and passions, with a teacher to facilitate things (and make sure we actually did something). The year before, I had taken a class in computer graphics and sound in which we learned Encore, an early notation program, so I had developed a taste for moving notes around. Based on that, I decided that my “thing” would be composition, and I now had a class period every day to devote to it. I didn’t really know where to start, and I didn’t have very much guidance, which in some ways was a blessing, because I had to figure things out on my own. Up until this point, I loved doing music, was excited about it, and even thought of myself as rather good at it, but I had never thought of making it a profession before, and I wasn’t even taking private trombone lessons. That year, I worked through a part-writing book, practiced a lot of trombone, listened to a ton of music (the public library let you check out four CDs every week, and I had my driver’s license by that point, so I could get there when I wanted to go; they had a great selection of classical music, including a good amount of the cool late-minimalist stuff that was coming out in the 80s and 90s).

There was one other composer in the class, Renee Goubeaux, who was later my first girlfriend, and is now a cellist in the Toledo Symphony Orchestra.  We sort of spurred each other on, sharing stuff with each other and talking about pieces we wanted to write.  I had done a lot of reading, and was starting to put sounds with what I had read.  I tried to write a few pieces–I was interested in writing band music, canons, modal things that incorporated serial transformations.  We performed a couple of pieces as part of the performances that the class would put on.

The next year, my senior year, I did more of the same, culminating with my senior thesis, a concerto for trombone and string orchestra.  I played in the Columbus Symphony Youth Orchestra that year, and auditioned for colleges as a trombone performance and music education major.  I thought that perhaps composition would have some place in what I was doing in college, but I didn’t feel like I had been doing it long enough to make it my main focus.  I did take some private lessons as an undergrad with Wes Flinn, who is now on faculty at the University of Minnesota-Morris, and with Joel Hoffmann, who is still at CCM.  I immensely enjoyed taking orchestration and studying counterpoint in my theory classes, but I still didn’t consider myself a composer.

Despite all the listening I had done, I still didn’t understand that a composer didn’t have to be someone who wrote pretty melodies–I thought there had to be a catchy tune, somehow.  It didn’t seem to occur to me that what I was hearing in, say, Philip Glass, wasn’t about tune at all–it just sounded good.  In those pre-Internet days, scores were hard to come by, and I wouldn’t have necessarily thought to go looking for them, either.  So I spent years thinking of myself as an arranger, or as someone with an interest in composition but not doing much composing.

I’ve also realized that I never really was a “tonal” composer, in that I never took the time to really absorb the language to tonal music and let that be my pure expression.  Perhaps this is my background as a trombonist instead of a pianist, or just listening to years of rock music (my other favorite music), and then being dumped into the world of wind ensemble literature in college (although we played Persichetti in high school, too).  I have a real ear for orchestration and a strong rhythmic understanding of things (we’ve discussed this), but I’m not a tonal harmonic composer in my heart of hearts.

I also am not a part of what used to be called the “avant-garde,” and what these days we refer to as “new complexity.”  I don’t compose tonally, but I don’t compose in such a way as to be deliberately ground-breaking or difficult all the time.  I want to compose music that expresses what I want to express while also being something people want to hear and perform.  Sometimes I’m successful in this, sometimes not.

So–as much as I’ve been exposing you to post-tonal methods, techniques, materials, and repertoire, if you are, in your heart-of-hearts, a “tonal” composer, you need to write that way.  Study the rest, because it may come in handy someday.  What I’ve been trying to get you away from isn’t “tonal” composition, but writing that is merely a copy of historical styles.  There are reasons to write like Chopin or Mozart, but it’s difficult to be taken seriously in 2014 if that’s all you do (in fact, I’ve found it useful to engage in style copies at several different points in my career).

That trombone concerto back in 1994 was an attempt to be tonal.  I didn’t follow the “rules” very well, and as satisfying as it was to write that piece, it wasn’t very successful from a musical standpoint.  The very next piece I wrote, a song cycle, worries much less about keys and more about rhythm and the flow of melody–it was my first vocal piece, setting some of my favorite poems from high school English class.

In some ways, the important thing is to keep writing, keep listening, keep reading.  If I push you on to certain things, it’s because I think it’s my job as your teacher to try to help you get into a college program, and that means we have a hard deadline about twenty-eight months from now.  Your personal style–tonal or not–will develop as long as you keep writing, keep listening, keep reading.

I hope this helps!

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Mahler, Symphony No. 6, third movement

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

Eric Knechtges, a colleague at Northern Kentucky University, recently sent out a survery to university composers.  One of the questions was,  “3) Any advice for potential composition students concerning the college application process, and/or constructing a portfolio?”

Here’s my answer:

In our portfolios, I like to see three compositions which demonstrate the student’s stylistic preferences, ability to pursue a project to completion, and interest in various media.  In general, it is not necessary to include a large-ensemble piece, especially if performance recordings are available of smaller-scale works.  MIDI realizations can do more harm than good.  I would rather hear or see short-to-medium length pieces that demonstrate technical mastery of compositional skills such as motivic development, phrase and phrase group organization, variation technique, harmonic and rhythmic coherence and ability to pursue an idea to its conclusion in a fully-formed piece (with beginning, middle and end).  Submitted scores should have a professional appearance, with attention to the details and standard practices of manuscript or digital score preparation–dynamics, tempi, articulation.  There should be a clear sense that I am not looking at a “first draft,” and that significant effort has been put into revision and the “polishing” phase of work.

Perhaps these are merely my personal prejudices (particularly about making a score look good), but some of these traits are evident to me in the great music of the past.  One of these, motivic development, is the main idea behind the third movement of Mahler’s Sixth, and I want to explore that today.

When I’m teaching basic composition to my students, I always stress economy of material, because emphasizing a single motive or a small group of motives throughout a piece builds unity while also providing opportunities for variety.  Unity is essential because it makes the piece sound like itself and not like a string of melodies or harmonies.  Variety, however, is very important in most styles, because very few listeners want to hear a great deal of exact repetition.

Mahler has set this movement in the key of E-flat major, a key that is somewhat removed from the symphony’s key of A minor.  On closer inspection, though, it is the relative major of the parallel minor of the relative major of the home key (a minor to C major to C minor to E-flat major), so there is a relation here, although it’s somewhat tenuous.

The music begins with a theme, stated in the violins, that introduces much of the material with which Mahler concerns himself throughout the movement.  As Russell Mikkelson frequently states, composers are like bad poker players, because they show you their cards at the beginning of each hand.  In addition to the head-motive of this theme, with its distinctive sol-mi-sol rising and falling sixth, there are motives in the second half of the first full measure (motive a, four eighth-notes, descending by third, then by seconds) and the second half of measure 3 (motive b, a written-out “turn”).  In measure 8, the oboe presents a final important motive, motive c, a figure which alternatively rises falls and rises, with sixteenth-notes on the second half of each beat to give the impression of hesitancy.

The a motive reappears in the violin melody in m. 13, first implying a IV triad, then a borrowed iv on its repetition.  Immediately thereafter, the c motive appears in the violins and woodwinds, again as part of the melody.  In m. 16, the a motive reverses its earlier trick, outlining iv and then IV (the entire passage is constructed over a tonic pedal point).   Measures 20-27 present a fascinating woodwind accompaniment texture, based on the c motive and its inversion.  The melody is assigned to the English horn, and begins in m. 22 with an inversion of the head-motive of the first theme–a falling and rising fifth instead of the sixth from before.  The key of g minor is suggested here, but it does not last, with a return to E-flat major in the next section of music, beginning in m. 28 with a horn melody that incorporates all the important motive material so far.  In m. 31, Mahler extends the dissonant Db5 in the solo horn by two beats, requiring a 2/4 bar (m. 34) to put the next cadence on the downbeat.

There follows a chromatic passage (mm. 36-41) that appears to lead toward C major, but then at the last moment returns to E-flat.  The next passage is based solely on the motives (a and c) from the first theme, with the c motive dominating the music in mm. 42-52, with a making its appearances in mm. 45-46, again highlighting an alternating major-minor chord.  While the overt major-triad-turning-minor motive that has characterized the previous movements of the symphony does not appear in this third movement, there seem to be more sublte, buried echoes of it in this particular use of the a motive, which occurs several times.

Measures 53-56 present a fascinating common-tone modulation, where the pitch G changes from mi in E-flat major to me in E minor.  First the c motive and then the a motive introduce the “second theme,” this time in the horn.  As this theme dissolves (it never really becomes a full-fledged theme, but its certainly too long to be simply a motive), Mahler begins to expand upon the a motive–first in the clarinets by inversion and rhythmic displacement, then in the bass instruments by expanding the third into a fourth, allowing two repetitions of the motive to cover an octave (in m. 65).  In mm. 68-70, a chromatic sequence that maintains the contour of the a motive is heard against the c motive (modified) in the trumpet and oboe.

In mm. 76-77, an almost Baroque-sounding descending-fifths sequence appears–extremely familiar in Common Practice styles, but realtively rare in Mahler, who simply doesn’t seem to have harmonic rhythms that move this quickly.  In the following measure (m. 78) is an early appearance (although not the first, but the first significant one) of the a motive transformed by both retrograde motion (the third at the end instead of the beginning) and the displacement of the third note up an octave, putting dramatic leaps of a seventh and a tenth into the texture.  The c and then the a motives pull the music to the next key, E major, at m. 84.

A note to my students, a spectacular example of the technique known as “horn fifths” appears in m. 85, introducing a trumpet melody that relies on the c motive.  It seems that the tendency is for the c motive to be spun out into some variation of the a motive at many points in this piece, such as in mm. 89-92.  In mm. 95-99, the c motive, and then the a motive create a monophonic modulation (based on the diminished seventh chord) to return to the main theme and the home key.

Measure 100 and the following passage suggest a recapitulation, but Mahler has other plans in mind.  The last chord in m. 114 acts as an augmented sixth chord which points to C major (an interesting use of the augmented sixth to point to a tonic function instead of the dominant, in this case to a key a minor third below the original key).  All three motives (a, b and c) appear in this C-major section, which ends in an unprepared modulation to A major  (mm. 124-145, again, down a minor third).  In this section, Mahler employs the a motive in the bass with the c motive in the horns against a violin melody that reaches higher and higher, to a C#7.  In m. 137, A major turns to A minor, without a key signature, as the oboe gives the “second theme” material. 

A slightly less abrupt key change leads to C-sharp minor in m. 146, as the full orchestra begins to enter with with climactic material based on the a motive (at first, to m. 156 or so), then on a chromatic version of the c  motive, this time in eighth notes instead of the alternating eighth-sixteenth-sixteenth-rest pattern.  By m. 160, the music has abated, leaving music in B major based on the b motive, followed by the c motive to set up an entrance of the a motive on the Neapolitan chord (C major, m. 164).  The major-minor motive is impled by the a motive in mm. 167-8, again extending the phrase by two beats, which are then rectified by the other 2/4 bar in the movement, m. 171.

The a motive takes over the texture in m. 173, as the music returns to E-flat.  Then in m. 176, the descending fifths sequence appears in a moment that is reminiscent of nearly every Hollywood love theme.  A note on the scoring here–one of the interlocking voices here is given to the 1st and 2nd violins, and the other to the violas with the oboes and clarinets, and the effect is very strong (of course, it seems to require seven woodwinds to allow the violas to balance.

The remainder of the movement is coda material, dependent mostly on the a motive and some of its modifications.  Mahler’s use of dynamics in m. 188 allows an effective color change, and there is an itneresting use of rhythmic augmentation of the a motive (with octave displacement, and modified to suggest harmonic closure) in the flute in m. 196ff.  Overall, the tautness of this piece seems to outdo everything Mahler has presented so far.  Despite the sprawling length and scoring of this symphony, the motivic clarity allows it to be highly managable in a way that hasn’t always been the case in these works.

On, then, to the highly-charged, tense finale.  I hope to be able to concentrate on aspects of compositional structure rather than any supposed autobiographical content (a study of how much of this is authentic and how much simply mythological would be very interesting; one day, I hope to tackle Henri-Louis de la Grange’s massive biography of Mahler.  Until then, my biographical understanding of these pieces comes largely from Kurt Blaukopf’s shorter work).

A final note, I’ve recently become aware of a similar project to my own, done much better, I must say, and by a composer of vastly greater experience than myself.  Anyone reading this blog should head over to YouTube to see Don Freund’s videos analyzing Book I of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.  Great stuff!

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Functional Harmony

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

I have a little series of little tonal pieces that I write for use in second and third semester theory.  I got going on them because we don’t have a very large library here at OPSU, at least in the area of scores, and I needed pieces I could throw on the exam or midterm without worrying that students had seen them in piano class.  In the end, it was just easier to write something new, and it has turned out to be more fun.  It really gives me a chance stretch my chops a little bit and write in the style of Mozart or Chopin.  Here’s the latest… it took about a half-hour to write from start to finish, and the point was to provide a piece that included a sequence and all the types of non-chord tones we studied this semester but that didn’t involve secondary functions and other third-semester stuff.

The latest in a series of Itty Bitty Pieces.

The latest in my series of Itty Bitty pieces, a chance for me to practice writing tonal music.

My wife enjoys these pieces greatly, because they sound pretty and they don’t last very long, so I always make sure to play them for her, just to let her know that I can write such things.  The question has come up, now and then, as to why I don’t write such music all the time.  I mean… it’s pleasant, it’s easy to listen to, it has the potential to be quite meaningful.

The problem isn’t this music–the problem is me.  I could write lovely sonatinas and waltzes and scherzos and all the other wonderful music that Mozart and Schubert and Chopin gave us.  I might even find the work rewarding.  Over the last few years, I’ve discovered that melody isn’t really the challenge I once thought it was.  I used to think, back in my high school days, that a great melody was the key to writing great music, and I had this inferiority complex about it, because I wasn’t just brimming with melodic inspiration.  If I actually thought of a melody, I would rush to find staff paper to write it down–even getting out of bed in the middle of the night because I was afraid to lose it.

It’s not about melody, folks.  It’s about harmony.  Most melodies are fairly boring without their underlying harmony, and functional harmony has proved fascinating to our culture in a way that we are still trying to deal with.

Then there are the harmonic composers out there.  Some of my composition students over the years have got some theory knowledge in them and are set to invent the next “Tristan” chord.  “What do you think about this chord right here?” they say to me.  “It’s a blah-bitty-blah-blah-blah with an F# in the bass… isn’t it amazing?”  As I listen to them, all I can think is… it’s not about harmony either.

It’s about rhythm.  I’m prepping to teach Music Fundamentals over the summer, and as I’m rereading Duckworth’s book, I notice that he agonizes over a definition for rhythm.  I still like the definition I used to use when I taught sixth-grade general music–rhythm is “the interaction of musical events with the basic pulse.”  I’d like to know what Duckworth thinks about that.

I’ve long viewed myself as basically a rhythmic composer, feeling that the other musical elements follow.  A piece that works, to me, works first on a rhythmic level, not melodic or harmonic, and I rarely encounter problems with a composition that can’t be solved rhythmically.  For me, rhythm is what makes a piece work.

Which is why I can’t write functional harmony and consider it to be my authentic voice.  I need harmony to be subservient to rhythm, not at best an equal partner as it is in Chopin or Mozart.  I don’t know if it is my training as a bandsman, by immersion in popular styles like jazz and rock for so many years or just the way music seems to work to me.  I enjoy music with shifting meters, metric modulation, syncopation, assymetrical meters and all the rest.  I don’t reject harmony completely, but I can’t carry on writing I-IV-V-I and thinking that I’m doing something authentic–I would always be channeling some other composer, and usually doing it badly.  I think of one of my favorite songwriters, Billy Joel, who wrote a set of Fantasies and Delusions in a more or less classical styles.  Nice, entertaining little pieces, but not as good as their models.

That said, I’m glad that I can write my Itty Bitty pieces, or a jazz tune, or arrange horn parts for a rock band.  That stuff is just as important to what I do, as it turns out.  We live in this world of tonal, often functional music.  When I compose, it isn’t meant to be background for shopping at the Gap–it’s meant to be something people sit quietly and contemplate.  It’s meant to help me reach out to the rest of humanity, first through collaboration with other musicians and artists, and then by speaking to an audience.

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