Thomas J. West Music

Throughout my experience as a musician, I have grown through many different kinds of experiences. I began as a child enjoying music performance. In order to remain involved with the kinds of performing groups I enjoyed as a student, I became a music teacher. Gradually over the course of my teaching career, I found myself increasingly interested in teaching music in its own right in addition to enjoying a performance. Eventually, my teaching led me to composing music.

Commonly Held Myths About Music Composition

I, like most people I know, once considered original creative ideas to be hard to come by. Nothing could be further from the truth, whether we are speaking of new inventions, scientific discoveries, new products and services, or new ways of human expression in the performing and fine arts. We as a culture have simply talked and taught ourselves out of it. Consider these commonly held beliefs about music composition specifically:

• Great composers are people like Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven who are "supremely gifted" and super-human in their abilities
• To be a composer, you have to study music for years and become an expert
• You have to be completely original and unique to write new music
• No one will want to hear music that I write myself because it will "sound amateurish" or sound like something that's already been written
• I have to get my music published to be considered a true composer
  

In our culture, we have over the past 100 years changed from the average person being a music (and dance) performer and composer to a music consumer. The technical traditions from Western Europe combined with the creative style from Africa created Jazz, Rock 'n' Roll, and everything that followed. It used to be that folk music was actually music composed by and sung by "regular folks". Along the way, we left the composing, creating, and performing to the "experts".

How Necessity Got Me Composing

I'm sure my first experiences with composing were not unlike anyone else that has tried to write anything original. You sit there and think, "Something original - but what?" Nothing comes, and anything you do come up with sounds like something you've heard before. You can even pinpoint the source sometimes. In my case, trying to compose concert band music ended up sounding like Francis McBeth.

Back in 2000, a long-time friend of my band program passed away. We wanted to do something special in his memory, so I commissioned a fellow band director who was a budding composer to write an original piece in memoriam. This occurred in June, and I assumed the piece could be written and we would premiere it at the following winter concert in December.  The piece was not ready in time. Ok, the spring concert then. All I got from the composer was an eight bar introduction which was less than I had hoped for, both in quantity and content.

I had promised our friend's widow that we would have a piece for him, and nearly half the students who knew him were graduating within the next school year. So, I did the only sensible thing I could - I fired the composer and wrote my own piece!

What I found is that when I had a specific reason to write and a specific subject to write about, the piece practically wrote itself.

As a band director who had been at that point teaching three years, I knew enough about band instrumentation to create playable parts for everyone. Not only that, I was able to customize the parts to the strengths and weaknesses of our ensemble. The end result was a piece called We Remember and when we played it in rehearsal I was pleasantly surprised at how it sounded!

What You Actually DO Need To Know To Compose

Literally anyone can write music. There are a few prerequisites:

1. You have to be familiar with at least one musical instrument. That could be any instrument, including the voice or using a computer or other electronic device.
2. You have to understand at least some kind of music or sound notation. In the traditional sense, this means reading music notation, though there are plenty of musicians who compose strictly by letter names, chord symbols, etc. In modern music making, you could also be familiar only with sequencing software and the sound patches and envelopes they employ. In most cases, there is still a basic knowledge of pitch, meter, and rhythm required.
3. You have to understand the basics of melodic writing. How do melodies flow? What makes a melody sound like a complete musical thought? An understanding of scales and keys can help here.
4. You have to have some kind of basic form. Even if the form is as simple as one eight bar phrase, music needs to have form in order to make sense to the listener.

You can actually begin composing with just an instrument you know how to play and a basic tonal pattern such as the pentatonic scale. No other knowledge necessary!

Obviously, the more proficient you are on an instrument, the more instruments you have direct experience with, the more you understand music theory and chord structure, the more you understand texture, form, and expressive qualities of music, the more you are able to communicate with what you compose. That being said, even a beginner on an instrument can begin to improvise melodies after only learning a half-octave's worth of notes.

Why Music Composition Is A Final Exam

This coming school year, I am going to be incorporating basic music composition assignments into my performance-based instrumental music classes. Every student is going to have a chance to write some original music, beginning first with simple melody lines and going from there. Music composition really becomes a outcomes-based assessment, because the student has to take everything they know about music, their instrument, and expression and put it all together in a project that can be easily demonstrated by whatever performers the music is written for.

Quite simply put, composing music is the "kitchen sink" of music education.

Although not every student will be the next Mozart, Duke Ellington, Paul McCartney, or Aaron Copland, giving students the opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge of music in this way will improve their performance as a soloist, an ensemble player, and a lover of music.

Because this is a new area of endeavor for me as a teacher, I will be returning to this Music Composition series regularly on my blog throughout.  All of the related posts on this topic will be group together under the Music Composition category of my blog.

This article (c) 2010 Thomas J. West. All content on ThomasJWestMusic dot com is licensed under a Creative Contributions Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please contact the author before publishing on or off-line.