tertAnt

Well... to be honest I have no clue how composers of contemporary music work. Back in the days Mozart used to devise a theme or two then build up from that, employing harmony and counterpoint and voice-leading etc. to make it all sound pretty. Later on the rules were relaxed a bit, but there was a steady framework according to which most composers did their job. All of them had the goal to make a good composition, be it pretty like Don Giovanni or ugly like Beethoven's Great Fugue. Now most composers don't really employ traditional harmony and counterpoint anymore. So how does it work? They surely don't cram a few random notes here and there and call it "Atonal piece for bassoon, organ and marimba" (There probably are some decent pieces for that group out there). There is of course serialism, but what do you do with your tone row? Since anything is okay, how do you know what to do? It doesn't have to sound good by old standards, so every possible combination of notes would work. If you're a minimalist, you take a phrase, change it a little and then again, slowly. Of course these are broad terms so I'm generalising a lot. Also, how do atonal or really modern fugues work? Some of the ones I've heard don't seem to pay attention to dissonances and their resolutions which are one of the main driving forces of any form of counterpoint. Just having a few voices and let them imitate a theme at some interval doesn't make it a fugue, so what else is there? Finally, what does the term 20th century harmony mean? Because to be fair, most people who haven't good extremely good ears can't tell the difference between Gb7+11b9 chord and a Bdim7-9+13 chord. I know there are other chord systems than triadic ones, but I don't know how these work. Anyone out there to enlighten me? I'm not bashing contemporary music here, I'm just wondering about these things as I find it hard to find artistic merit in a piece which is just random notes to me. Please help me understand that a bit better. I personally wouldn't be able to compose a very freestyle composition seeing that I'm a bit lost as to what to do and what not to do even in a strict piece like a fugue after the exposition.

Start small. Unless you have a lot of experience you won't be able to compose longer pieces that are of satisfactory quality for yourself. You have to write lots of smaller pieces and make each of them as perfect as you can to develop. Small binary and ternary forms are ideal for this. Find a theme or a melody, just one, then develop it into a small minuet or something - Baroque dance forms are ideal for that. Try setting yourself strict limits, eg. 8 bar/16 bar binary form (A A B A B A). So you have to come up with 16 bars of material derived from your theme. Then, do this a couple of times; depending on your taste you might want to compose a keyboard suite or something similar. Slowly expand from that - a new suite with a modulation to the dominant in each piece (just for exercise) to make it more authentic. Double the length of your pieces. A whole suite of 6 pieces developing just one theme. The less thematic material, the more you'll learn to use it and the more coherent your piece will usually be. That's why entire large-scale works can be built from one theme or tone row. That will teach you how to use your ideas to the fullest. You can write the pieces in any style you want, you don't have to learn counterpoint or other techniques (although they might be useful). Soon you'll be able to write one of these miniatures without thinking and move onto larger things, depending on what you like. It's a brilliant daily exercise for any composer.

There's hardly anything new to be done anyway if you ask me, but old + new = new, the order doesn't matter. Is Gorecki's 3rd a Symphony using new techniques or a modern piece using an old approach? Well, Baroque music leaves quite some space for new things. The harmonic language was quite limited - iminished and dominant 7th chords were used a lot but the piece always stayed in a related key most of the time. Formally there weren't a lot of options: binary or ternary (dance) forms, fugues, canons etc. in comparison to what composers were doing later on. If a baroque piece in sonata form is feasible is open to discussion although I doubt it. There are also atonal fugues. One important thing to notice is that a lot of counterpoint builds upon the concept of dissonances and their resolution, thus convincing atonal contrapuntal works are very hard to pull off. Also Peter, serialism uses "old" terms like inversion, retrograde etc, but is still regarded as relatively modern.

Voce, Why don't you do the exact opposite?