Musical composition definition, process, examples and opinions.
You probably have a favourite song or two. It is perfect. You feel something when you listen to it. If there are lyrics, you relate to them well, or maybe you think they are absolutely beautiful. Maybe you also really like the band that is playing the song. And what about the person who wrote the song? The composer, surely, you have thought about them and pictured them at work. They are probably sitting in a metal bunker in a hidden location, wearing a white lab coat, safety goggles, gloves, refilling their ink pen so they can finish writing the bridge of your favourite song. Hmmm. I do not think so! This scenario is too sterile and isolated to have been the birth place of your favourite song. Of course, composition is tricky and involves a lot of knowledge, experience and emotion, but it’s definitely not a scientific, sterile process. It is messy, it involves trial and error, rounds of editing, breaks, etc.
Just like anything that was ever created, a song takes planning, prototyping, testing and time. It is a creative process, which means that you might be creating problems and solving them at the same time. You might start writing how you always do, or you might try a completely different approach. Maybe you will get stuck for three hours. Maybe, while on a walk, you hear a melody being sung by birds that you later take to a piano and work out a story from. Maybe you are writing with 3 other people, or maybe you are trying not to be yourself.
Musical composition is an ancient tradition found all over the world that is timeless. Folk songs exist in every culture; lullabies, party songs, story songs, sad songs, religious songs. Music connected the people in a community, in a culture. It is interesting to note that we do not know the authors of many of these old folk songs. Maybe they were created together in a community while socializing, or when people were bored on a long journey, maybe when something interesting happened or when a child just would not fall asleep. Some people were probably better at creating songs than others, but it certainly was not exclusive. People that wrote music had no idea what music theory was or that music could ever be visually represented (until a certain point).
There were and still are a few that wanted to dig deeper, find new sounds, explore and discover music. Florence Price, Johann Sebastian Bach, Louis Armstrong, Clara Schumann, Billy Strayhorn, Dorothy Fields, Thelonious Monk, and other composers, wanted to push themselves into the musical universe to create something new. It seems that this type of person is the only one we consider a composer, but we should not. Everyone can compose. Well, they can certainly try. I am not saying everyone can compose well, but everyone can write music or create their own melody. It is the drive to practice, to learn, to discover, over and over again for years, that creates the stereotypical composers we know.
Now what about the song, the product of this work? Well, it seems that it captures emotion. Perhaps the composer’s own emotions or maybe the emotions of someone else. Maybe it is a song about a memory or an event in one’s life. It could be an expression of their personality, of who they are or who they wish they were. Or, it is a wittily crafted story full of metaphors and poetry.
In addition to emotion, there are so many other elements involved in composition. The subject, technique, medium, palette, size, detail, frame. You can tweak all of these, and the settings are infinite. They are like pieces of Lego, but of every possible colour, size and in an unlimited quantity.
When we hear a recorded song, we might notice the voice, drums, piano and guitar right away, but the song might also have a full horn section playing backgrounds at times, it probably has a bass, maybe it has another guitar, maybe it has some strings as well and some electronic textures or sounds. The average listener will not consciously notice those things until they listen a few times, or someone points those things out. The biggest reasons for this are the differences in volume between the instruments in the song, and the parts that each instrument is playing. To make the song listenable, we need to have these differences otherwise it would be a mess and the listener would not know how to listen! We organize these differences by categories known as foreground (the things we can hear right away and that we walk away singing), middle ground (the stuff that holds everything together– the beat, chords) and the background (the stuff that you will notice later, that add some depth to the song you rarely notice).
Composition can be very cathartic both for the composer and for the listener. It can act as a diary, where you can log your thoughts musically. Or it can be like a photograph, helping you capture and preserve a memory. It can be your way to protest or to show your support for an important cause. Or it can be the subtle yet important sensory experience in a film.
This is just a summary of some thoughts on composition and what it can be. In the next articles I will discuss these thoughts more technically.
If you have any comments or questions, email me at tetyanahar@gmail.com :-)
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