Lesson with JCguy

[written in reply to http://www.youngcomposers.com/forum/random-assignment-dumping-bin-11614.html?#]

First thing I'm going to say is: don't do things as fast as possible.

One only truly learns composition from experience, and that takes patience.

Please bear with me, and resist the urge to rush - try and absorb all you can along the way.

It's traditional to start a piece with a root position chord. I would personally avoid starting on a first inversion if you're working with in a 18th-19th century idiom.

The first inversion is less stable than the root position chord, and this is probably why for hundreds of years pieces began and ended (and still often do) with root position chords.

Ok, now some things to say about the melody. There are many different things that may characterise a good melody, one of which being it would sound well being sung.

Of course this isn't the be all and end all of melody writing, but for starting, I think it is important to consider.

You might ask, of course, why worry if it would sound good being sung when it is written for piano, but melody and counterpoint were all originally intended to be sung by the voice. So you can consider instrumental melody as having evolved from vocal melody, and often it is good to retain qualities of the former in an instrumental melody.

Certain things come naturally to the voice, and others less so. On instruments, the difficulties are usually of a quite different nature, and so it would be very easy for (say) the piano to play a melody that would be quite impossible for the voice.

To begin with, we want to avoid these things, and concentrate on writing somewhat vocal melodies. Many of the principals of writing vocal melodies can then be expanded, and idiomatic use of each instrument can be made.

This has been a long rambling prelude to some things about your melody which I am going to point out. Many of these things would be improved by considering a vocal line.

You have many semiquaver leaps and arpeggios, and sometimes without any great direction or melodic curve to them; they seem to serve only to enliven the rhythm.

There are some rather large leaps which are most unvocal (not of course as much of a concern on the piano, but even in piano writing it is good to avoid too many large leaps).

You would do well to read up the rules in counterpoint for leaping, et cetera. E.g., after a leap of a fourth or larger, it is wise to return within the leap by step. Or, after 3 or 4 conjunct notes, it is not good to leap in the same direction to an accented note (on a strong beat of the bar).

It is things like these that will help your melody sound logical, and speak more clearly.

You might also consider keeping the bass-line simpler for now. The extra moving notes (for example, in bar one) do nothing to help the harmony, while creating inconsistency in rhythm (most other bars have 2 minims).

Bars 1-2 sound weak, because you repeat the tonic chord thrice, when the listener really wants some kind of harmonic progression. This is cause for blandness.

Likewise, ii - I is a weak progression, and the listener is left feeling unsatisfied at the end of that phrase. The rest is slightly better, harmonically.

You use the melody quite well, but the melody itself is still somewhat clumsy in my opinion.

Look at the melody at the start - the first half of the bar is fine, you could do any number of continuations to "balance" that first half, but the second half you have is a little unwieldy, and that comes across. This is mostly due to the leaping, and lack of a melodic contour or direction (plus the fact that the first bar and a half does not change harmony).

Try an exercise like this again, but try to make the melody logical. Don't worry about phrase structure or cadences, or trying to making the harmony clever, just write what is most natural to you. I want you to consider a high point of the melody (you may achieve this mainly by actual pitch, but consider other means for it as well, e.g., dynamics, harmonic tension, thickening of texture) and I want the melody to have an overall contour and direction. In terms of rhythm, I usually find it good practise not to place faster rhythms (semiquavers for example) on a strong beat (or at least on the start of a strong beat).

Anyway, I've rambled, but hopefully there's some food for thought there.

I can't obviously teach you how to write a melody, you must put in the thought and do the work yourself, but I can try to help. I suggest looking at the scores of the masters, and examining their melodies. Consider the soaring melody in the middle movement of Beethoven's path