Newsgroups: rec.music.compose Path: spud.Hyperion.COM!netcomsv!netcom.com!csus.edu!wupost!uwm.edu!caen!umeecs!zip.eecs.umich.edu!fields From: fields@zip.eecs.umich.edu (Matthew Fields) Subject: GEMS 1 [reprint] Message-ID: <1992Nov17.211315.26764@zip.eecs.umich.edu> Sender: news@zip.eecs.umich.edu (Mr. News) Organization: University of Michigan EECS Dept., Ann Arbor, MI Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 21:13:15 GMT Lines: 301 GEMS 1 ==== = Matthew H. Fields I mentioned a willingness to post some general and specific observations regarding music composition, and so far, I've received an enthusiastic response. Therefore, this is the first such posting. The topic for today is: DRAMATIC SHAPE I have chosen to present this topic first because it seems the most useful to the greatest number of people, and, of all the topics I've offered to write about, it is the least tied to a particular style. Disclaimers: I am presenting the material here mainly as my opinion. If you try to make use of my suggestions and they don't help you write fabulous music, I don't accept any liability. Likewise, it is strictly to your credit and none of mine if you do write fabulous music before or after reading these posts. Plenty of the ideas I will be discussing in this series have been mentioned before, and some theorists may even wish to lay copyright claim or patent claim to some of them. However, I claim that the core ideas have been known to composers and used by them long before anybody published any writings on them, and these ideas are therefore basically in the public domain. On the other hand, I actually sat down and wrote the text of this posting, and it took me a bit of time and thought, so if anybody were to exploit this text as a commodity without consulting me, I might get very mad (standard disclaimer). All that having been said, I am interested in getting some feedback on how interesting or useful you find this article. ABSTRACT In this article, I will explore several basic hints for writing pieces with convincing climaxes. INTRODUCTION One way in which I like to classify music is into two kinds: pieces which move from a beginning towards a climax, and pieces which don't. Really, the only way which a piece can avoid a sense of climax is to keep a fairly consistent level of intensity throughout. Many pop/rock songs do this, and pop/rock composers may feel that this article is irrelevant to their art. On the other hand, such artists often compose a series of their songs or performances as an album side, a dance set, or an uninterrupted portion of a concert, and on this scale they often seek to create a motion to a climax across many songs. Therefore, perhaps this topic will be interesting to them and performers in general, too. DEFINITIONS Now, by intensity, I refer to a rather abstract psychological variable, something on the order of "level of frenzy". Typical ways of expressing increasing intensity are: a) getting louder (making a more emphatic music); b) moving towards extremes of pitch, both high and low (again, immitating spoken expressions of strong feeling); c) adding additional instruments to those playing (in classical music we call this "thickening the texture") d) interspersing melody with more and more irregular, frequent rests (in emulation of shortness of breath) and so forth (you may always use your imagination to find more ways to use in addition to these). Sometimes, people will refer to the dramatic curve of a composition as its "form". This is a tricky word to use, at least in English, because it can also refer to what I call a rhyme scheme for a piece (is it made of repeating verses with a bridge, is it sonata-allegro form, is it ABA form, rondo, or what?)... So, if I were called upon to discuss dramatic shape as a kind of form, I would have to distinguish between "dramatic form" and "rhetorical form". The two can have clear correlations; e.g., in a form that goes Refrain-verse-Refrain-verse-Bridge-Refrain, the climax might typically be towards the end of the Bridge; however, there's no rule that says the climax has to be in any particular part of the rhetorical anatomy of a piece. In sonatas, climaxes typically come at the beginning of the recap, or at the beginning of the coda, or at the beginning of the recapitulation of the second key area, or at the very end, or... FOUR BASIC SUGGESTIONS OK, so by now, I'm assuming you have a basic idea what I'm talking about. what are the hints that I can offer on this material? 1) Strongly consider having only ONE main climax. You can have lots of subsidiary climaxes, but if you make one peak just this much more intense than all the others, this may give your piece a sense of having really argued its point, having really expressed its emotion, etc. If you have two nearly-equal main peaks, you run the risk of the second one seeming tedious. Consider making the second one bigger/louder or gentler/softer than the first. 2) DO SOMETHING ASSERTIVE AT THE BEGINNING OF YOUR PIECE. This needn't be loud or sharp, but if you start too soft or mild in the hopes of then gradually cranking the intensity up, you run the risk of failing to grab the listener's attention. Let me tell a little story. Once, several years ago, I took a composition lesson with a famous New England composer who will remain nameless. Fresh off a plane from his backwoods home, still wearing his coonskin cap, stinking of cheap whiskey and cigarettes, he arrived having had less than 2 hours sleep in the previous 2 days. After listening to a few minutes of my recent compositions, he said, "Well, I can see that I don't have to encourage you to get to know any basic mechanical transformations for your material, Matt." Then he reached over and yanked me to my feet by my collar. "Your music has to grab me like this, and NOT LET GO UNTIL THE VERY END!" With this, he ended the lesson. Perhaps I experienced Zen enlightenment in that moment; perhaps not. In any case, the suggestion is to save your softest music for just a little ways into your piece, or for the ending. 3) In works of longer than 30 seconds duration (this figure is chosen somewhat arbitrarily, but the exact number is irrelevant), the main climax does not come at the beginning. It does not come at the middle. It comes anywhere from 60% of the way through the piece to right at the end. Otherwise you run a terrible risk of having your listeners get bored with the gradual denoument of your work. 4) Having gotten good at implementing suggestions 1-3, you may still feel that your climax is somewhat dissappointing. Let's say you now have a piece which works like this: i ^ n / \- t -/ \ e -/ ^ \- n ---/ | \- s -------/ | \-- i -\ ---------/ | \--- t --\ /------------/ | \-- y v | \-- time | | climax An easy method that often works to make the climax less disappointing goes by the name "prolonging the climax". What it often is is a prolongation of the music just before the climax, and how it works is like this: 1) make sure the music just before the climax strongly suggests that the climax is coming; 2) write and insert more of it--possibly a lot more of it. In classical music, this is accomplished by such technicalities as dominant pedals, deceptive cadences (Fokke: see the passage just after the horn calls in that piano piece!), etc. My favorite example from pop music is one almost everybody has heard: Lennon/McCartney's HEY JUDE. It works up to a frenzy, then spends about half the cut repeating the frenzied verse over and over. 2 minutes later, the industry-standard fade-out is applied. When this single was released, the crowd went wild. Now, this suggestion doesn't guarantee a fix. If you're expecting a solo flute playing in its lowest octave to sound climactic during a symphony band piece, you may need to rethink other aspects of the piece. However, it works so remarkably well so much of the time that it's worth trying, at least part of the time. Concerning the dramatic shape we saw above, suggestion no.4 would revise it to look like this: i ^ n ---------/ \- t -/ \ e -/ ^ ^ \- n ---/ | | \- s -------/ | | \-- i -\ ---------/ | | \--- t --\ /------------/ | | \-- y v | | \-- time | | | prolongation | climax Another famous way of carrying out the same procedure is to get almost to the climax, then suddenly cut back to a very low level of intensity and build back up to the climax in just a few seconds of music. In fact, there are so many variations and permutations on variations of these techniques to be explored that you can have endless fun being creative with them. As a composer, you might want to listen to a variety of works which you feel have powerful climaxes, and see how they address the motion to the climax. OTHER CONCERNS Now, I haven't mentioned how words create or don't create climaxes of their own; a favorite suggestion of mine is to experiment with the possibility that in the midst of a rising vocal line, the climactic text is suddenly sung very softly, or whispered, so that the text is understated, and then the accompaniment may or may not state the climax just afterward. This can be a particularly spooky, frightening effect. A lot of people feel that they should compose a piece from the beginning to the end. Obviously, suggestion no.4 above says that you needn't feel constrained to do so (in this way, composition differs from improvisation, in which, once you've played, you can't go backwards in time and adjust things). This is a general admonishment of mine: don't feel constrained to work in sequential order! You're the composer, so you can work in whatever order is best for you. In particular, when you have a great idea for some part of your piece which is out of sequence, by all means record it (on tape or in writing), so you can use it when the time comes. Along with this admonshment comes another basic one: no note is absolutely sacredly unchangeable, not one of yours, not one of mine, ... heck, I can even imagine that some day there might be someone who could improve compositions that were originally written by Mozart. Finally, there are two important admonishments: 1) a word to beginning composers: begin! and 2) sooner or later, you're going to have to be satisfied with how well you've polished your piece, so you might as well call it "done" and play it for someone, then start a new piece. The previous paragraph of admonishments will apply well to techniques that I describe in detail in future articles, too. LISTENING ASSIGNMENT For those who are interested, a work to get to know and study which demonstrates a lot of what I've been talking about is TREN OFIRAM HIROSZIMY (Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima), by the living Polish composer Krysztof Penderecki (composition date: about 1964). This piece is scored for 52 violin-family instruments (violins, violas, cellos, and basses), who play a variety of massed sounds, screeching noises, scratching noises, etc. The piece has no regular beat, and no recognizable melodic shapes; really, the main feature of this work is its undulating, shifting level of sound density, intensity, and emotional fervor. After a few subsidiary climaxes, the piece comes to a point about 65% of the way through its length where the players drop out one by one until, after a brief cello solo, there's a couple seconds of silence. Then, a renewed build of intensity leads to several minutes of almost-climax, a brief pause, and a final climactic ringing chord. The sounds of this piece are not friendly, but rather fierce. They are not deeply grounded in the Western Classical Tradition, or in any folk music either, for that matter. But the dramatic curve of the piece as a whole is as classical as the motion to a climax in a Shakespeare play. The piece can be heard on several recordings, including a current CD from Warsaw on Conifer Records. WRITTEN ASSIGNMENT For those who like to practice principles in little studies, here's one which I've assigned to beginning students. Write a composition for 1-4 players. Limit your duration to about a minute. Use only "found sounds", that is, noises made by non-musical objects that you have handy. Notate your piece with a graphical notation of your own devising, NOT incorporating any conventional music notation. Preface your piece with a legend or key so that your players can quickly decode your notation. Stage a small performance and perhaps even a recording session of your new work. Suggestions: don't be overly specific about matters of time or pitch: this tends to delay your premiere and make you ponder extra considerations other than dramatic shape. DO seek out interesting sounds, like attaching a contact mike to a string from which a wire hanger is dangled. DO seek to express yourself, even with these (possibly) unfamiliar restrictions on sounds/materials. DO try to build a convincing climax to your piece. DO try to throw in something special to mark the end of your piece, if your piece continues beyond its climax. DO experiment with prolonging the climax. If you try this assignment and feel moved to violate some of its rules, relax! There will be no penalty. CONCLUSION I hope some of these ideas are useful to some of you out there. The only way to learn to use them is to play with them constantly until they become an automatic part of your musical personality. For at least a while I will be keeping a copy of this article here in my disk directory. As long as the volume of "reprint" requests is reasonably manageable, I will offer to send copies out by e-mail. I have heard a lot of interest in my hints for canon and fugue, but as a matter of logical sequence, I intend to delay them until I've had a chance to post concerning the mystery of parallel perfect intervals (some of you clearly already have a good idea what I'm talking about here, and some of you probably have no idea, but I'm most concerned about the middle third: those who have come across the proscription of parallel perfections in a theory class, but don't see what it has to do with the real world) and 4-part harmony. I can't really tell you when the next article will be ready for posting, since I haven't written it yet. The feedback I get from this article may have important consequences concerning how I write the next one. 11 August 1992 Matthew H. Fields, D.M.A. .