Author: adambsilverman

Composition II – Pitch Sets

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The study of set theory is one that is deep and often covered in music theory courses devoted to the analysis of 20th century music. A “nutshell” description of it is here. The typical approach to pitch set analysis involves considering pitches numerically (0=C, 1=C#, etc.), understanding the different pitch-class sets that are possible (there are 208!) considering three-note collections (trichords), four-note (tetrachords), five-note (pentachords), and so forth, with each set representing both the notes in “proper” order and under both ansposition and inversion, as is the common practice.

Why use set theory as a composer?

One point of set theory is to create a “language” for understanding music that is not based on triads as a fundamental feature of melody and harmony. Indeed, pitch sets are used like notes of a chord — they can be a framework for melodies, stacked as chords, embellished, and so forth. The order of pitches isn’t what is important (as it is with twelve-tone music).

For instance, music could be composed that features the pitch-class set 0,1,4 (it’s called “3-3,” since it is listed third on the standard table of pitch-class sets), transpositions of that set, and inversions of it:

3-3 is, in fact, a main feature of the second movement of Bartok’s String Quartet No. 2. We can most easily see this by looking at the intervals between notes of the piece; when motives are framed by a major third that is divided by a half-step on one side or the other, it is “3-3,” like in this music at rehearsal 1:

This passage also has a couple of extra notes – the G# in bar 19 helps expand 3-3 into more of a scale, as does the C# in bar 23. The C# in bar 23 also helps make another version of 3-3 (0,1,4 transposed up by a half step).

Another way that Bartók used this trichord is as main notes of the melody in rehearsal 4:

At rehearsal 7, this trichord is found alongside 3-4 (0,1,5 – imagine a perfect fourth with a half step-in the middle, like C-C#-F or C-E-F).

At bar 116, there is a very strong chord that combines 3-3 and 3-4 into a single unit.

As the music continues from this point, the cello performs a melody that also blends 3-3 and 3-4.

…and forth it continues.

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Composition II – Rhythm and Meter

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Plenty of contemporary art music has ordinary rhythm. There are other approaches, however, that can be used to provide different sorts of rhythmic interest.

Music that seems to be free or only loosely coordinated

One example of this music is the first movement of Olivier Messaien’s Quartet for the End of Time, entitled Liturgy of Crystal. Listen to this music while following the score, noting how each instrument seems to move at its own pace. What aspects coordinate this music? Do instruments seem to align with the meter? Or to each other? Where do you perceive downbeats?

Some music provides extreme freedom in its interpretation, giving little information about how it is to be rhythmically interpreted. For instance, the beginning of Aleksandra Vrebalov’s My Desert, My Rose has performers coordinate by reading from the score (it’s here) until rehearsal letter T [here], at which point the music (more or less) settles into a consistent 7/8 meter.

Music with a propulsive beat

Much music of the 20th and 21st century has a strongly propulsive beat, not unlike some classical music of the past and certainly similar to much rock and jazz. Complex rhythmic patterns can be especially clear when they are accompanied by a persistent groove. The second movement of Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No. 2 is a great example of how small bars (in this case, 2/4) can be combined to make phrases of different lengths with a constant flow of 8th notes providing a rhythmic underpinning.

Music in unbalanced meters

While traditional music tends to be either in simple or compound time, music can also combine aspects of each (for instance in 5/8 meter, in which each bar has one simple beat and one compound, not necessarily in that order) or can shift from one to the other. Returning to Messaien’s Quartet for the End of Time, this approach can be seen in the sixth movement, called Dance of the Furies, for the Seven Trumpets. A tour-de-force entirely in octaves and unisons, notice how bars combine aspects of simple and compound meters (and more complicated rhythms, like beats with five 16th notes), and how Messaien did not even notate meter.

Music can also sound fresh and unpredictable in a consistent meter with an uncommon time signature (like Steve Reich’s Eight Lines in 5/4), or free and flexible in meters that change constantly (like Reich’s Proverb), or this part of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Another terrific example is #140 (“Free Variations”) from Bartók’s Mikrokosmos.

Tempo fluctuation

Some composers, most notably Elliott Carter (1908-2012), explored the use of metric modulation to move from one tempo to another. Here’s a charming video of a drummer demonstrating the concept. Carter’s music is particularly complicated in this regard because the metric modulations are combined with an existing complexity of rhythm. For instance, in his solo guitar work Shard, a metric modulation in bar 5 uses one sixteenth note of the previous tempo as a single triplet unit in the next. In bar 17, the duration of five 16th notes becomes used as the new quarter note pulse. This continues…

One fantastic online resource is the Metric Modulation Calculator. It helps calculate tempi based on meter changes.

Additive rhythm is a name given to the technique of using flexible lengths for musical fragments, constantly changing the lengths of a particular gesture. This can be reflected in changes of time signatures, or with a consistent time signature (as in Jacob her Veldhuis’ Caterpillar – here is one page of the score).

Polyrhythms

The use of two simultaneous rhythmic “paces” (“polyrhythm“) can provide great rhythmic interest. This can happen through the use of tuplets, like in this segment of the second movement of Charles Ives’ Trio (layering triplets in the cello and the pianists’ right hand against sextuplets and septuplets in the other parts). It can also occur in the layering of different-length patterns that share a beat-division, such as Adam Silverman’s Pounding Fists; notice in this score, starting in bar 5, how a raucous texture is created with repeated ostinati of different lengths (the triangle pattern repeats every two beat, the bell tree every four; the glockenspiel ostinato lasts five eighth-notes; the two vibraphones loop every three eighth-notes; the two marimbas every five sixteenth-notes).

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Composition II – Minimalism

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What is minimalist music?

Reduced from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/musicapp-medieval-modern/chapter/minimalist-music/

Minimal music is an aesthetic, a style, or a technique of music that originated in the New York Downtown scene of the 1960s and represents a new approach to the activity of listening to music by focusing on the internal processes of the music, which lack goals or motion toward those goals. Prominent features of the technique include consonant harmony, steady pulse (if not immobile drones), stasis or gradual transformation, and often reiteration of musical phrases or smaller units such as figures, motifs, and cells. It may include features such as additive process and phase shifting which leads to what has been termed phase music. Minimal compositions that rely heavily on process techniques that follow strict rules are usually described using the term process music.

Composer and music critic Tom Johnson wrote “The idea of minimalism is much larger than many people realize. It includes, by definition, any music that works with limited or minimal materials: pieces that use only a few notes, pieces that use only a few words of text, or pieces written for very limited instruments, such as antique cymbals, bicycle wheels, or whiskey glasses. It includes pieces that sustain one basic electronic rumble for a long time. It includes pieces made exclusively from recordings of rivers and streams. It includes pieces that move in endless circles. It includes pieces that set up an unmoving wall of saxophone sound. It includes pieces that take a very long time to move gradually from one kind of music to another kind. It includes pieces that permit all possible pitches, as long as they fall between C and D. It includes pieces that slow the tempo down to two or three notes per minute.”

What techniques are associated with minimalist music?

Some minimalist music features the sound of a drone (or pulsing drone), such as La Monte Young’s “The Well-Tuned Piano.” Music may gradually “evolve” by repeating notes or fragments for spans of time, as in Julius Eastman’s “Gay Guerrilla” [score | audio].”
Minimalist music tends to have a rhythmic characteristic of stillness or slowness (such as in David Lang’s “The Passing Measures“) or else it is motoric and incessant (like in John Adams’ Shaker Loops).
Ostinato and repetition of a melodic cell (a few pitches, either steady or rhythmic) is often found in place of a melody, such as in Philip Glass’ Two Pages.
- Terry Riley’s seminal piece In C (the score is here) features a drone note “C” and an indefinite number of players improvising by moving from one small cell to another at an intuitive pace.
- These cells often “evolve” through the use of a conceptual technique, like additive or subtractive process – this may be at the beginning or end of a melody (as in Rzewski’s Coming Together – here’s an analysis that explains it) or by filling in gaps of a pattern until it is complete (as in Reich’s Drumming – notice [in this score fragment] how each repeated bar of music adds one note at a time until the pattern is full).
- Sometimes one or more bars are repeated for definite or indefinite numbers of times before progressing to a new cell (like in Two Pages, or in Steve Reich’s Nagoya Marimbas.
- Permutation is the changing of a pattern through methodical changes, such as in David Lang’s Cheating, Lying, Stealing, which achieves rhythmic variety by repeating a pattern while inserting tiny pauses between each note of the pattern [read about it here].
- Classic counterpoint techniques are also sometimes used. In Arvo Pärt’s Fratres, an additive process is used to create an eight-chord melody (it builds from the outside-in, performing chords 1-2–7-8, then 1-2-3-6-7-8, then 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8). This pattern is then repeated in inversion. Those two patterns are then repeated in transposition again and again until the piece is complete.
Layering is an important compositional element in minimalism, both in how layers may be added or subtracted abruptly (as in Michael Gordon’s Trance) or through fading in and out (as in Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians).
- One special technique of minimalism is the use of extremely close canon, such as in Reich’s Clapping Music (notice how the same pattern is performed by both groups of clappers, but one layer is shifted by an eighth note bit-by-bit) or in Louis Andriessen’s Hout, in which four players perform the same quick line, one behind the other at a distance of one note.
- When two identical lines move in a canon that has no discrete steps (one layer “floats” away from the other, either by being at a slightly different speed, or by the temporary speeding or slowing of one part, a technique called phasing occurs, as in Steve Reich’s Piano Phase.
Harmony can be chromatic, but it is usually triadic or pan-diatonic (using all the notes of a key as the basic harmony), such as in Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten. This piece also uses the medieval process of mensuration canon, in which each melodic layer moves at half the rate of the line above it. A composer’s use of harmony is often one of the characteristics that makes them distinctive, such as Glass’ use of triads or Reich’s use of extended jazz chords.
- One interesting process can be the repetition of a pattern while periodically changing its key signature, such as in Michael Torke’s The Yellow Pages (read here) or Robert Maggio’s A Ring That Has No End from Riddle.
Dynamics in minimalist music are typically steady (loud throughout, or quiet throughout), or in a single trend (quiet to loud over the entire span of time, or the opposite).
Instrumentation of minimalist music varies from one composition to another, but certain trends have emerged. Early minimalist music tended to be written for their composer-led ensembles, so Steve Reich’s works often were written for percussion and pianos; Philip Glass’ ensemble blended keyboards, voices and saxophones. Ambient music like Brian Eno’s Music for Airportsis often associated with electronic media. One common feature in much minimalist music is homogeneity of timbre, resulting in single-family ensembles like Reich’s New York Counterpoint (for multi-tracked clarinets) or Different Trains (for four string quartets with pre-recorded sounds)

The History of Minimalism

Early/conceptual minimalism
A simple process is allowed to progress with little intervention from the composer. There is often little more than one or two musical layers in combination, or a single layer in (often haphazard) counterpoint with a copy of itself.

Progressive minimalism
Characteristics of early-period minimalism are employed in combination with more intuitive approaches to composition or mutiple techniques in combination. Static or expansive textures and vivid colors are favored over process-based conceptualization.

More listening

Steve Reich “Music for 18 Musicians” (1974-76) [video]
Philip Glass “Einstein on the Beach” (1976) [YouTube audio playlist]
John Adams “Shaker Loops” (1983) [video]
Pauline Oliveros “A Woman Sees How The World Goes With No Eyes” (1989) [YouTube audio]
Michael Torke “Four Proverbs” (1993) [YouTube audio playlist]
David Lang “Cheating, Lying, Stealing (1993) [video] [analysis]
Michael Gordon “Trance” (1995) [YouTube audio playlist]
Anna Thorvaldsdottir “Aeriality” (2011) [video]
Nico Muhly “Drones” (2012) [audio]

How Does One Create a Minimalist Composition?

Choose amazing timbres
- Great instruments
- Effects
- Long-tones
- Flurried sounds
- Interlocking patterns
- Amplification & effects
- Similar timbres (8 guitars, 6 voices, etc.) or contrasting (rock band, orchestra, etc.)
- Spoken word (choral spoken word?)
- Overwhelming sonic combinations, or spare sounds?
- Fading in/out (of chords, tones, layers, etc.)
Choose a stylistic approach or process(es)
- Audible process
  - Additive/subtractive linear process
    - Notes/chords/sections/phrases before/between/after melody notes
  - Additive/subtractive textural process
  - Additive/subtractive harmonic process (notes expanding registrally from a small core, etc.)
  - Phasing; canon (unison? at expanding/contracting intervals?)
  - Key “rotation” through repetitions that change one note at a time
- Steady-state
  - Polyrhythmic layers
  - Other types of unpredictable variety
Choose a rhythmic approach
- Are lengths of phrases consistent, or do they vary with the process?
- Are repetitive patterns symmetrical, or in meters such as 5/4 or 7/8? Or expanding and contracting?
- Is the music pulse-oriented or free?
Choose a notational approach that suits the concept or procedure
- fully/strictly notated
- strict notation with loose repetitions
- musical “cells” with repetitions or improvisations
- set of instructions
Choose a duration and adapt musical process to accommodate it
- Infinite music (cyclical)
- Finite music
  - Indivisible: completes one cycle of a process
  - Sectional: different processes occur successively, or same process is repeated with new material
  - Rounded: opening material returns after digression

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How To Prepare a Composition Recital

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First steps

Compose all the music and prepare sheet music for performance.
Schedule a date and venue… this may be done in collaboration with key collaborating performers who you know will be involved.
Ask all performers to commit to performing on the recital. Let them know that they will need to commit to a full level of preparation! In an ideal world, this would include all of the steps listed below (learning the music before the first rehearsal, attending three rehearsals, a recorded “dress” rehearsal and the concert)
One month before the recital, your program book is due to Matt Miller. Your professor will need to fill out a venue management form with any special requests (risers, extra piano, harpsichord, etc.)
Percussion must be organized by the percussion performer on your recital. They will need permission from faculty to check out instruments for rehearsals and the concert.

Preparing the Music

INDIVIDUAL PREPARATION

Establish a rehearsal schedule = 2 months BTR (before the recital)
Distribute the score & a part to each player = 1 month BTR
Check in with each performer about “difficulties”; this gives you a chance to iron out any bugs in the music, but also to let them know they should be looking at the music by this point. = 3 weeks BTR
Re-confirm rehearsal schedule = 3 weeks BTR

REHEARSAL #1 – 2 weeks BTR

You may not want to attend this one. Ask a trusted friend in the ensemble to take notes with questions for you that you can answer about the music, and be accessible by phone during the rehearsal in case they need you urgently.

REHEARSAL #2 – 1.5 weeks BTR

REHEARSAL #3 – 3-4 days BTR

FULL RUN-THROUGH OF EACH PIECE

Close to recital – the day before or the same day

Record it!

Before the Concert

Have the ensemble dress appropriately according to your wishes. Concert-black is classic. It’s a semi-formal occasion, so no suits are needed, but sharp concert dress is important. Be sure they know the concert order and how they should enter (Will they be introduced? will they be “clapped on”? Will they be onstage during speaking portions of the show?) Get the Best wireless earbuds to deeply listen to your favorite artists and songs.

Publicize the event! Tell your friends, your family… everyone. It feels better to have friendly faces in the audience, and plenty of them.

Prepare some remarks to make from the stage. You should be sure to thank relevant people (especially those who gave of their time and talent to perform your compositions, but also your teachers, parents, friends, supporters). Keep your words concise and casual.

Make sure the recording is rolling.

Ask people to silence their phones. It’s your recital.

At the Concert

Try to relax! Enjoy the performance! Don’t wince if there are wrong notes. If anyone gets terribly lost, don’t be afraid to stop the music and help them get back together. It’s not Carnegie Hall, after all.

Afterward, when people tell you how great the concert was, thank them. They are being nice, and hopefully sincere. Don’t tell people that it was awful… this is not the time to be humble… just accept the compliment.

Thank each performer individually. It is very nice to give them a thank-you note or small gift. Remember that they were preparing your music when they could have been studying for their music history exam.

Teaching Materials

Online Resources for Music Composition

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COMPOSING TOOLS

Orchestration

http://www.dolmetsch.com/musictheory29.htm
https://tamingthesaxophone.com/. Be sure to check out multiphonics!
Guide to Drum Kit & Percussion Notation: http://web.mit.edu/merolish/Public/drums.pdf
YouTube instructional videos
Instrument Studies For Eyes and Ears: http://resources.music.indiana.edu/isfee

Composition Techniques

Metric Modulation Calculator: http://www.thenewstyle.org/calculator/
Composers who discuss musical approaches, such as Rick Beato and Jacob Collier

“Instruments” and samples

OPPORTUNITIES & CAREER

DISCOVERING MUSIC

WCU library subscriptions: https://library.wcupa.edu > Resources > Databases > Subjects/Music

Alexander Street
- Classical Music Library
- Classical Scores Library
- Contemporary World Music
- Jazz Music Library
- Opera In Video
DRAM
Met Opera On Demand
Naxos Music Library & Naxos Video Library
Oxford Music Online

https://www.newsounds.org

Sheet music collections

http://imslp.org
Boosey & Hawkes Online Scores
http://www.musicsalesclassical.com/ondemand (issuu scores)
Individual composer sites that have scores and audio.

Blogs and web ‘zines

http://www.newmusicbox.org.
https://www.icareifyoulisten.com (includes areas on technology & entrepreneurship)

Recording sharing

MUSIC NOTATION

Learning notation software

Of Note: http://www.rpmseattle.com/of_note/
Scoring Notes: https://www.scoringnotes.com

Matthew Hindman fonts (all free!) for use in computer software and for annotating music essays: http://www.hindson.com.au/wordpress/free-fonts-available-for-download. Be sure to get:

Times + Musical Symbols (Mac only) and Rhythms
Instrument-fingering and pedaling fonts are available for harp, saxophone, recorder.

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Audio Examples for “Simple Forms”

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Franz Schubert: German Dance D. 783, No. 5

J. S. Bach, “Schlaff’s mir mir, Gott” from Anna Magdalena’s Notebook

Franz Josef Haydn: Divertimento Hob. XVI No. 8

Franz Josef Haydn: Sonata Hob. XVI-43

George Gershwin: “I Got Rhythm”

Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano Sonata Op. 26, mov. 1

Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 2, mov. 3

Schumann “Träumerei” from Kinderszenen

Robert Johnson “Ramblin’ On My Mind”

Beethoven Minuet in G WoO. 10 No. 2

Blog Posts Composition & Orchestration Pedagogy Teaching Materials

Better Feedback on Creative Projects

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A post by David MacDonald that is worth re-posting; I intend to direct my composition and orchestration students to this in the future.

Better Feedback on Creative Projects

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Orchestration Challenges

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ALL ABOUT challenges

? = strings only • ? = woodwinds only • ? = brass only • △ = percussion only

Compose a short piece of music (1-2 minutes) that is all about…

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Preparing for a Composition Department Concert

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The End-Of-Semester Concert

For the end-of-semester composition department concert, you will need the following:

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Pursuing Graduate Study in Music Composition

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Continue reading “Pursuing Graduate Study in Music Composition”

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Composition Challenges

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Successful completion of these challenges involves approaching each task directly and thoroughly, avoiding extraneous musical details that do not contribute to the requested sonic effect.

Challenges that must be composed for acoustic instruments with no electronic accompaniment or sonic modification are indicated with a ☀ symbol. Challenges designed for electroacoustic music are labeled ⚡. Challenges designed for piano or piano-plus-one are labeled ?.

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Examples of Melodic Elision

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What’s a Sequence?

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The Basics

Musical sequence seems to be a simple concept, but the term is actually used in different ways, many of which are similar. This post will hopefully lend some clarity to the subject. The kind of sequence I’m describing is defined in the Oxford Companion to Music as:

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Dear Distance Education Students

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This is a slightly-edited email that I just sent to a class of students in my online course that is designed for graduate students who need to review (or learn for the first time) undergraduate music theory concepts. Course grades had been falling as material became more difficult. This course is made up of fourteen weekly lessons, each of which includes an activity, an assignment (self-graded with automatic release of a key upon submission), and a quiz. Quizzes are available all week, and must be done by midnight Sunday.

Dear students,

I see a disturbing trend: that most of you are submitting their assignments at the end of the weekly unit, and so aren’t making time for asking questions or for study before the quiz. Here’s what I found for the last five assignments:

Aural Skills Blog Posts Teaching Materials

How to Practice Ear Training Elements

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1) Intervals

Goal: To be able to identify all intervals an octave and smaller by ear and to be able to sing any interval above or below a given tone.

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Dissecting the Melody of “America The Beautiful”

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A companion-post to this is “Motive: Beyond Simple Identification“.

The song America The Beautiful by Katharine Lee Bates and Samuel Ward is the topic of a lovely NPR feature, Rob Kapilow’s What Makes It Great. It can be heard here. Designed for public radio audiences, it is very accessible to people with no musical training or knowledge of specialized jargon. What Kapilow did was describe the song’s use of melodic motive in plain English. The song is so saturated with motive that I think it’s worth translating the description back to jargon to explain it with more depth.

Here’s the sheet music (click the image to enlarge and click here to download it as a PDF).

The music starts with two motives that we can label x and y.

Notice how neither motive is constricted by bar lines; the pick-up note is part of what makes these motives clear. Also notice that important traits distinguish these motives: x has a distinctive rhythm (Kapilow calls it “short-long… a dot”) and a special downward-skip melodic contour.

Motive y has a plain rhythm of six steady notes, and its contour is different every time it appears. It’s often noted that rhythm is the most important parameter for making a motive identifiable; everyone points to Beethoven’s Fifth’s DA-DA-DA-DUMMMM as an example. But what is noteworthy (no pun intended) about the simple rhythm of America’s six notes? It’s that they occupy a special place in the musical hypermeter — the “location” of these notes in the phrase. In this case, all phrases are in a traditional folky pattern of four bars in length with the music coming to repose (the “cadence point”) on the downbeat of every fourth bar.

Take a moment now to examine the music, labeling each occurrence of x and each occurrence of y. Unlike in most songs, when you are done you will have labeled every single note of the tune as being identical to x or y or a variant of it. Examine how the variants are related to their first occurrences, or to each other. Then consider this question: what else in this melody provides the elegance that has led this song to be a cherished America classic? After you’re done, return to this page and read the rest.

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Scoring Ideas

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Various textures to use as possible springboards for orchestration projects. Note that thick textures made from voicing large chords under a plain melody are absent here! Click images to enlarge.;

Modulation Teaching Materials

Modulation: An Introduction

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$math-compass-clipart-46820_compass_lg$ Basic definitions

Modulation – moving from one key to another – occurs in many forms of music. In classical music, it is often an important dramatic feature, and is a structural element in certain musical forms (especially sonata and rounded binary form). Like modulation, tonicization implies another key as a tonal center; the difference is that a modulation is confirmed through a cadence in the new key. A key or chord may be tonicized in the middle of a phrase, with no cadence to confirm it as a modulation.

There are two basic methods of modulation: pivot and direct.

A pivot modulation is found in the middle of a phrase when one harmony or a single pitch is “reinterpreted” to function in each of two keys.
A direct modulation tends to be found when a new phrase suddenly begins in a new key. There may be one or more turnaround chords (explained below) that soften the transition between keys. Turnarounds are not technically “pivot chords” since they do not occur in the middle of a phrase.

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Journaling for Composition Lessons

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Ten out of ten composition lessons that I teach end with me jotting down a short list of repertoire for the student to study over the coming week. Most often, these pieces are chosen because their instrumentation or compositional approach is similar to that being used by the student. They also tend to have the secondary goal of broadening the student’s experience and leading them toward more adventurous and distinctive writing.

As far as I can tell, my students almost never follow through. To the professor (that’s me, but I think most composition professors do this), it is one of the essential parts of the lesson. To the student, it seems like extra work when all they really want to do is sit down and make stuff up.

With this in mind, I decided to create this page and direct students to it. What follows is a list of questions that must be answered for each piece of music assigned as listening. Some of them are “due diligence” to make sure that a score and recording were, in fact, located and perused. Others are designed to help guide the student’s study of the score and suggest practical ways that hearing new music can help a musician progress as a learner and gain new tools for composition.

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Key Modulation: Elgar’s “Moths and Butterflies”

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Learning to follow key changes is not easy for many students, especially when they are asked to locate modulations themselves and distinguish between different methods of modulation. Here is a step-by-step guide that uses a charming example of Romantic music: Edward Elgar’s Moths and Butterflies from The Wand of Youth Second Suite. More practice is also available on this site in “Modulation Practice: Beethoven’s Violin Concerto.”

Step One: Get to know the music

Begin by hearing a recording [here’s one on YouTube] while reading the sheet music [it’s on imslp.org — Moths and Butterflies is the third movement]. Please note that this piano reduction has two mistakes! The right hand chord on beat 1 of bar 3 should have a D♯, not a C♯. In that same bar, the left hand should return to bass clef; its two notes are both E, and the bass clef continues until treble is restored in bar 5 as shown.

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Decoding the “Love On Top” Modulations

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For the last few years, whenever I teach modulations, the song “Love On Top” (Beyoncé Knowles/Terius Nash/Shea Taylor) is brought up by students. It’s a modulating tour-de-force insomuch as it moves through five keys with surprising swiftness, and it doesn’t hurt that modulations like this are uncommon in R&B.

As impressive as it is, there’s just one trick used four times. Here’s how it goes.

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Modulation Practice: Beethoven’s Violin Concerto

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I find that students often feel “thrown into the pool” when confronted with analysis of modulations in a full piece of music. It is one thing to describe modulations in the context of a short passage (especially when it is in a simple chord-by-chord format, as it was for most of my undergraduate theory education), and another thing altogether when in the context of real, textured music and you would no believe the positive feedback, search for rock concerts near me to enjoy the benefits of music.

To bridge this gap, I offer this “play-by-play” analysis using an example from the first movement of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. Here’s a PDF of the sheet music, which is in a piano reduction by the composer Paul Dukas. We’ll be looking at bars 39-76, which begin in the fourth bar of the third system of page 3. Here it is as a jpg, too (click to enlarge).

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Modulation: Don’t Believe What You’ve Been Told!

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I love teaching modulation, but I am not satisfied with the common approaches to teaching it. We used to use Kostka & Payne at WCU (my experience with this book stops at the fifth edition, which is what I quote below), which is the text I learned from as a student. They seem to represent the consensus, that there are two kinds of modulation-by-pivot techniques:

Pivot modulations

Modulation by common chord. This is always taught first, which reveals a bias toward classical practice. It gets lots of ink in the textbook because it is something that can be broken down into steps and explained ad nauseum. The technique is to find the first harmony that works for the new key (usually its dominant) and back up to find the pivot harmony that works equally well in both keys. Students hate this… they never can remember that a common chord is common to both tonalities. But who can blame them? To a listener, the modulation begins with a chromatic shift.

Aural Skills Blog Posts Pedagogy Teaching Materials

How to Practice Melodic Dictation

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I am frequently asked by students how to build skills in melodic dictation, and while there is no “magic answer” (I think many of them want to have an instant solution that requires no time-commitment), I think skills can be built using a dedicated program of four approaches:

Blog Posts Composition & Orchestration Teaching Materials

Studying Art Song

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Preparing to teach a unit on Copland’s Twelve Poems Of Emily Dickinson to a class of composers who will, in turn, compose the “thirteenth song” as a style-study exercise. Thanks to Robert Maggio for the genesis of this unit and for most of these ideas!

And, for a quick link, here are the complete poems of Emily Dickinson.

When studying these songs, be sure to consider…

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Is This a Secondary Function Chord?

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Staff Input for Online Course Work

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Does this exist? For music theory online courses, I would like a simple interface that allows students to put notes on a staff, like in the exercises on teoria.com. It should be able to plug into my LMS (maybe Google Forms?) and allow students to (at minimum) spell chords and (even better) complete melodic dictation.

If this does not exist, please pass this message along to the good people at Noteflight or other code monkeys who might want to make some music professors very happy.

Aural Skills Blog Posts Teaching Materials

Video Solfège Submission Instructions

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Revised August 2015. For pedagogical context on solfège-to-video, you may wish to read “Video Solfège: Creepy, But Effective!” on this site. Another useful post for students is “How to Practice Melodic Dictation.”

Each week’s prepared singing must be submitted to D2L Dropbox for credit. Here is an overview of the procedure:

Practice the melodies.
Video-record yourself performing a melody.
Upload the file to D2L Assignments in the corresponding folder.
Repeat until all melodies due are submitted.

Blog Posts Composition & Orchestration Teaching Materials

Some Things Composers Think About

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Style: Relationship between any given piece and a musical genre

Technique: Difficulty of a composition • Amount of time it may take (or is allotted) to prepare for its performance

Harmony: Use of traditional vs. non-traditional harmonies • Use of tense/harsh/brash/complex harmonies vs. serene/pretty/simple harmonies • Stylistic connotations of harmonic types • Types of harmonic progression • Rate/naturalness/shock of harmonic change

Blog Posts Online instruction Pedagogy

Crowd-source teaching: extra credit “challenges”

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Last year, I tried out a technique for enhancing student engagement in online courses: crowd-sourcing representative examples of course topics.

Responding to a complaint from students that online quizzes were too difficult and extra credit options were needed, I offered students an opportunity to demonstrate comprehension by locating their own musical examples. This can be a tedious part of my work — finding “exemplary” musical passages that demonstrate each facet of a lesson. This way, I open up the possibility of getting something out of it, too; the best submissions can be incorporated into my course materials.

The process is simple: I create a Dropbox folder for each lesson in which students may submit three examples that fit specified constraints. One task, for example, was to submit (on annotated sheet music) three examples of musical modulations that exhibited different approaches: pivot modulation by common chord, direct modulation, and pivot modulation by change of chord quality. To earn full extra credit, they needed to find one of each and they needed to be correct and correctly labeled. Their examples also had to be unique among the class; no choosing a passage that had already been used by another student. If examples did not earn extra credit, the student may submit more batches of examples until they get it right, but only before the weekly unit quiz.

Once I received their files, I would add markup comments on their PDFs to show if each example was correct or incorrect, and make a note about why it was a good or weak example. Since the Dropbox folder is public, students could then examine their peers’ examples and learn from the successes and shortfalls.

In the end, a few problems sullied the process: