Whether you’re just starting out at composing or have been writing music for decades, improving your composing skills can help you find greater technical mastery, artistic fulfillment, and career success. Deliberately developing your composing skills is especially important if you’re not yet as good of a composer as you hope to be (which describes most […]
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Flow like Water: Developing a Professional Creative Process
Last week, I wrote about the two fluencies that professional composers must have: technique and process. Professional composers generally all achieve a baseline of technical fluency. Many, especially those in media music, also develop a reliable process fluency. Without both fluencies, you can’t be like Michael Giacchino, for instance, and take on a project like Rogue […]
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The Two Fluencies Professional Composers Must Have
All composers began as amateurs. You wrote music, with no or minimal training, because you loved it. Sure, being an amateur had its frustrations. It often took you a forever of fumbling to find the figures you imagined. But that earnest stumbling was part of the fun. In the end, simply hearing your music and […]
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How Composers Used To — and Could — Be Trained
Anyone who has studied music history knows that musicians have been theorizing about music for millennia. However, that theory has not always served as the basis for musical training. In particular, many classical composers did not learn “music theory” as contemporary musicians typically understand it. Reconstructing how composers used to be taught has been a major facet […]
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What I Wish Someone Told Me about Music Theory
[Ed. — After publishing this post, I discovered that many readers were misreading my intent and were unfamiliar with the background of my critique. Accordingly, I added and tweaked several paragraphs below and wrote an additional post. New readers may want to start by reading that subsequent post, “How Composers Used To — and Could […]
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The Courage to Commit
A few days ago, composer Dan Forrest asked a great question in the American Choral Composers Forum: These are two great questions: How do you know you’ve found “a really beautiful and worthwhile musical idea” How do balance the “courage to commit to an idea that might be good” vs. “enough awareness” to abandon an […]
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Hymn Arrangement Study Party, Part 2: Workshop Replay (10/05/21)
Here are the highlights from the above replay: Part 1 — Simple Harmonization 0:00: Essentials of chords — Blocked, Broken/Arpeggiated, Inverted, Embellished Arpeggiations, and Embellished Blocks 6:55: How (nearly) all tonal melodies embellish the tonic chord, with “If I Listen With My Heart” as a specific example (audio on YouTube) 10:50: The “quick and dirty” method […]
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Onions and Ogres—and Music
So what DO onions and music (and ogres) have in common? . . . Layers! Layers are the key component of “melody and accompaniment” textures I wrote about earlier this week. This week I’ve been thinking a lot about texture — the layers of activity in a passage of music and the relationships between these […]
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Hymn Arrangement Study Party, Part 1: Workshop Replay (9/28/21)
Here are the highlights from the above replay: 0:00: Welcome, Introductions, and Reviewing Ryan Murphy’s arrangement of “If I Listen With My Heart.” See — Sally DeFord’s Original Version PDF Ryan Murphy’s Arrangement PDF Tabernacle Choir recording (YouTube) 11:20: How DeFord makes her melody easy to remember using Rhythmic Motives 20:00: Introduction to “Melodic Voices” […]
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Five Tips for Writing a Good Piano Accompaniment
So you’re writing a piece with piano accompaniment. You’re probably wondering, “What do I do with the piano?” Many singers and non–keyboard-playing instrumentalists find it easy to come up with melodies, but when it comes times to create a keyboard accompaniment, they get stuck. Even pianists themselves sometimes might feel a little overwhelmed. Here are […]
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