Transcription
I've gotten messages very similar to this one countless times. I would say hundreds of times from young composers, maybe composers with a little less experience.
I've discovered that so many composers are in a very similar spot that I was in. They struggle with focus; they aren't quite sure how to get their ideas out of their head, onto the paper, onto the DAW. They have ideas, but they struggle to organize them. So then they say that they have trouble with arrangement when if they would change maybe the way that they were thinking about coming up with those ideas in the first place, it might make the entire process a little easier down the road.
I've been there and still find myself there from time to time. But every time that I fall back into that rut of feeling like I'm not quite sure how to develop an idea, I think back to my time studying composition very intentionally with a very excellent composition teacher.
More than a decade ago, Luigi Zanelli taught me a few basic core principles that I've carried with me, even if subconsciously, in every single thing that I write to this day. It really served to demystify the entire process of composition and the craft of composition for me because I always held composers in such high esteem that I felt like there was some magic to it. There must be some secret formula or something that I just didn't know.
The reality is it is a process; it is a craft. Any craft you can get better at by learning how to approach that craft and then practicing that craft.
So today, let's break it down into five key principles of composition that have served me incredibly well over the last 15 years or so that I've been actively composing. This includes some ways to reframe our process and organize things at the beginning of a project that will vastly help us actually get it across the finish line.
When I was younger, I always wanted to do more. I wanted more notes, more virtuosity, more opportunities and ways to show how clever I was as a composer. I guess more opportunities to impress the hypothetical audience that I didn't have.
But in terms of composition, less is more simply means doing more with less. So you're actually spending more time focused on a few ideas rather than always throwing more things at the project. Maybe that's something that you run into in the past.
It's one problem that I have when composing inside of a DAW: the infinite number of tracks, infinite possibilities to add more stuff when maybe I should just pare things down and focus on one or two core ideas.
Something really special happens when we take the time to do that. The development process of being able to extract more material that's related to or comes from those really strong ideas becomes so much easier.
Making your arrangements more coherent makes them fit together, feel like everything comes from what you've already established. For our listener, it helps ground them and unifies the piece so that they always understand what we're trying to say musically.
For us as composers, it helps us focus on getting more material from just a few strong ideas. The G minor waltz that I wrote at the end of 2023 is a really good example of this put into practice.
There's nothing overly complex going on; it's just a few core ideas that are highly memorable that I then take and extract and use throughout the piece as ligatures, ways to connect sections to other sections. There are fragments of the main melody present in the B section that tie the phrases together.
I am a textbook overthinker. It's my kryptonite; it's my weakness; it's what I do. This simple cliché, "less is more," keeps me focused. It keeps me reminded that I only need one or two really strong core ideas.
If I take the time to craft those ideas and make them really strong, then I have the building blocks for the rest of my piece.
We all know that storytelling is a powerful device, but in music, just saying "tell a story" feels a little abstract, like we're not quite sure how to do that.
So instead of telling you some vague nonsense about you should compose to elicit an emotional response from the listener—no kidding—I'll give you an actual musical technique that you can use to achieve this.
Stories have a narrative structure, form, and they're usually linear in some way. They have a shape to them; they have a story arc. We might call it in music. We can achieve a similar sense of narrative structure by writing in a more linear way.
This is a bit lost on a lot of modern composers if they've come up just doing rock or pop or some genre that is primarily focused on verticals, like just a vertical looping chord progression that doesn't really change.
When we write in those styles, we don't really think about how one note in one part moves to the next note in that same part and how that series of horizontal lines, when running together, creates the verticals or the chords.
This is why a lot of popular music needs lyrics to provide the narrative structure. But lyrics are non-musical elements; they are extra-musical.
So what if we make instrumental music? How do we convey some sort of structure, some sort of narrative? Well, let's think about our chord progressions as linear parts instead of blocked chords that hop around from one chord to the next.
I explained this in more detail in a free ebook that I made on composition that I still think holds true to this day. It walks you through some more of these principles that I like to use and goes into a bit more detail with more examples. It's free to download down in the description below if you're interested.
So now each part goes on its own journey, tells its own story. The great thing, the thing that I love most about writing in this sort of style, is that I can pull parts out of the chord progression. It doesn't need the full chord anymore because it, as a part, has a melodic shape to it.
So it's like having a series of melodies that all come together. You may know this as counterpoint if you studied any classical music. So now each part tells its own melodic story as well. I can pull them out; I can subtract them from the entire chord and still have something that's musically got a shape to it.
When each part can stand on its own or can work with just one other part, then we have more possibilities for variation from the same material. Less is more.
In this way, our chord progressions go from feeling like a repetitive blocked series of events to telling a story, being conversational, and therefore more memorable.
Here's another one that I did not understand at first when Mr. Z told me this. I didn't really see the difference between the two. But someone sent me an email recently where they said they were trying to create melodies that didn't sound cheesy.
I think by cheesy, what they meant was cliché. Now, the thing about a cliché is when we start the cliché, we know how the cliché is going to end before we ever get to the end of the cliché.
We've heard it so many times that it tips its hand; it kind of gives the punchline away before you even hear the entire setup. It telegraphs the ending.
Think outside the box. The same exact thing can happen in music. We've heard certain cadences, certain chord progressions, certain voice leadings so many times that we know how it's going to end before we even get finished with the phrase.
This is predictability. Inevitability is something else entirely. One of my favorite examples is the writing in the show "Breaking Bad" or "Better Call Saul," two of my favorites. The latter somehow may even be better than the former.
In both shows, surprising left turns happen that you don't see coming. But none of the characters ever does anything that you would consider out of character for them.
So there's consistency in the writing of these characters. They never behave in a way that feels like they shouldn't, but there's also an element of surprise, of freshness, to where those actions take them.
This idea of harmonic freshness is another one directly from my composition teacher. I continue to use it to this day because it described it so perfectly for me.
When I hear a chord that is harmonically fresh, that feels like it belongs there and yet I didn't see coming, it's one of my favorite things to experience as a listener and as a composer when I can pull it off.
But to have freshness, we need some sort of consistency, and that's where some knowledge of harmony comes in. I think harmony is one of the most important things to learn about as a composer. It impacts everything that we do.
So if we understand that anytime we have a series of chords, we're establishing a harmonic language, and we need to stay somewhat consistent within that language. Otherwise, it's like starting a sentence in French and switching to English halfway through.
Then the moments when we do something contrasting or something surprising, fresh, are way more powerful. So it's all about context: establishing patterns, establishing consistency, and then picking your moments when you break those.
So you have contrast. This is why I love learning about non-functional harmony because there aren't the same rules and formulas that apply to the predictability of functional harmony.
We have to use our ears, and these two principles of harmonic consistency and harmonic freshness are really what guide us.
Non-functional harmony doesn't necessarily mean dissonant; it's just simply that it does not operate by these same formulas that we think of with functional harmony.
I made an entire series of videos about that last fall and an entire video course if you want to explore that further. It definitely goes into way more detail than I can in this video.
Composition is a puzzle; it's a construction. It's made up of smaller pieces that make up the whole. I'm not just talking about large-scale form, like we have a big A section contrasted by a big B section and then the A section comes back.
Even within those sections, we have smaller components, like we might have a little A phrase that then goes to a little B phrase that then goes to a little C phrase and then comes back to little A. All of that can be within the big A section.
So music is like a conversation. We have sentences which make up paragraphs, which make up hopefully a coherent thought that we're trying to get across.
This is another point of contention with composers who want to do something experimental or want to do something groundbreaking. They typically want to abandon form or any kind of structure at all.
But guess what? Your favorite filmmaker, no matter how abstract the ideas might be, probably follows some sort of a structure with their storytelling. They don't completely abandon structure, and that would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
But they realize that by doing creative things within a set of limitations, a structure, that's where their creativity can really flow. That's where they can set up expectations and then pivot away from those expectations in ways that surprise and delight the viewer.
Without boundaries, you have no boundaries to push up against or to break or to blur. You need some structure.
A classic example of a composer from the Classical period and early Romantic period who did this was Beethoven. He took sonata form and blurred the lines of what sonata form was as a formula, as a form, as a structure.
He would do things like put a fugue in the middle of the development section. So he was taking all of these other forms and blurring the lines and combining them in unique ways rather than feeling like he had to come up with some new groundbreaking thing that had never been done before.
Instead, it was the way he put them together that had never really been explored before. The great thing about understanding that music is made up of these smaller building blocks is it unlocked something for me.
It's like, "Oh, well then I can experiment with moving these building blocks around." That's where a lot of the experimentation comes in.
Mr. Z once told me every piece has a model, and what he meant by that was that every piece has a framework that it's based on and then expounds upon.
So we can take someone else's framework and decorate it with our own material and then try different things from there.
What I found really interesting that sets apart my written compositions that I take the time to craft from my improvisations, where sometimes I just ramble on for a while and just do whatever comes to mind, which, you know, nothing wrong with that, but it's a different process.
I found being really intentional about mapping things out, writing things down, moving things around, helps me not waste my best material.
We may come up with an idea that is so memorable and so good that it begs to be repeated. The listener wants to hear that again.
But if we're just free composing with no structure or improvising and just recording everything straight into our DAW, we may miss those opportunities. We may miss a chance to develop an idea that is really powerful.
So writing those ideas down when they happen has been really transformational for me.
I think the single most important takeaway that I had from my time with Mr. Z was that composition is an empirical process: trial and error. It is a process; it's not magic.
One of the most transformative things that I got to do was just watch how he worked. I noticed that he never just sat there waiting for inspiration to strike. Instead, he just started to improvise and experiment.
Sure, his knowledge of theory and counterpoint and his previous experience were working in his subconscious all the time, but he wasn't sitting there working to any set formula.
He was using taste and experience to guide his decision-making. He would jot something down, then cross through it, then try a little variation on that and then cross through that as well.
Then he might combine elements from both of those ideas that he had crossed through, and then he would cross that out as well until he kept experimenting with this idea until he found something that he liked.
This is the act; this is the craft of composition. Once I accepted this as fact, this is just the way the process works and not waiting for some magic formula, that's when I started to get more work done.
It takes trial, lots of errors, and improvement with consistency and repetition. So practice.
Anyone telling you otherwise is probably trying to sell you some sort of AI tool. I have a bunch of videos on harmony that I mentioned before that I'm going to leave in a playlist right here for you.
And don't forget that free composition guide ebook is in the description below if you're interested.