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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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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Musical Variation Is Like a Good Set of Kitchen Knives
Variation in music is like having a good set of kitchen knives. If you use them properly, cooking becomes easy and fun . . . If you use them carelessly, somebody loses a finger . . . Likewise, in composing music, variation is NOT inherently valuable. How you use it makes the difference between Giving […]
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Why Should Anyone Care about Tonality?
Tonality is a musicological debate about style disguised as a theoretical debate about pitch organization. Whether it’s Schenker’s arrogant, narrow nationalism or Tymoczko’s generous, imaginative catholicism, the debate around what defines “tonality” is, at its core, a question of repertoire. No one would argue that the music of Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms is not tonal. […]
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Those times composers wrote a low F for violin
Every orchestration textbook will tell you that the lower limit of the violin (scordatura aside), is a G3 (G below middle C). But even with a normally tuned violin, composers don’t always obey that limit. Here are two examples (plus a bonus one in viola) that show why a composer might write beyond that written […]
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The Elegance of Holst’s “Jupiter”: The First Two Bars
I love the opening swirl of violins in “Jupiter” from Gustav Holst’s The Planets. Who doesn’t? Take a moment and listen to it: It’s thrilling! But what really gets me going as a composer are the details of its composition. This passage is extraordinarily elegant. Here’s the excerpt from the score: What makes this passage so […]
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Why are Alto and Tenor Parts so Boring?
Why do altos and tenors often get saddled with parts like this? Don’t composers know that singing the same two notes over and over again is boring? To understand what composers are possibly thinking, let’s dive into some music theory . . .
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Melodies vs. Gestures
Many people say melody — the foreground sequence of pitches — is an essential part of music, but lots of music does just fine without any pitches. Even music that uses notes often doesn’t have melodies. So how does music operate when it does not have melodies?
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