Lessons with MusicFiend

MusicFiend has requested lessons regarding development of material/ideas.

What current projects are you working on? Or would you rather start with a new project?

What I'd like most is to rehash the second part of my string quartet, and then I have the beginning of the second movement to work on.

Allegro and Dance.mp3

Allegro and Dance.pdf

Mvmnt2.mp3

Mvmnt2.pdf

What I'd like most is to rehash the second part of my string quartet, and then I have the beginning of the second movement to work on.

Allegro and Dance.mp3

Allegro and Dance.pdf

Mvmnt2.mp3

Mvmnt2.pdf

Ok, let's start on the first movement. First, give me an idea of what you were trying to do here. You can use your notation program to highlight your themes, etc. if you would like.

Allegro and Dance2.pdf

Basically, what I tried to accomplish is:

1: try to be creative. I kind of created my own type of "Dance" (While it's not, for example, a Minuet or Polonaise, I wrote it imagining dancing...)

2: put form on the backburner (yes, I did mention quite a bit about form in the file, but, when I wrote it, I did what came naturally without worrying a whole bunch about form--- When I wrote the notes, I used it to show where each theme was.)

Bah. You have a later version of Finale/Print Music and I can't open it! Go ahead and upload a .pdf please.

Ok, I'm going to start from A - D. I have created a .pdf of this sections chief motivic material - since your setting here isn't that elaborate, it really helps to isolate these things. (And, this is what I wanted you to do - and you should be able to do it whenever asked!) You'll find that attached to the end. When you work with ideas, you have to be able to isolate the ideas that you feel are most important. The goal is to use as few ideas as possible - if you use too many, you will not get that much interest out of a listener (i'm sure you've noticed that fact yourself in listening to others works.) So, i'll place these ideas of yours that you use through A - D. I want you to go through your score and write down measures where these ideas appear. Take your time if you need to, it's important you identify all appearances of these three ideas.

MF.pdf

Okay, I'm not entirely sure how to identify themes/motives.... But I think/hope I did it right. I really would like more understanding on WHAT a motive is, and how you determine what it is, and more practice identifying them, before we move on too much.

but here is what I got.

allegroanddance-showing themes 1.pdf

Ok, this is a great start!

I can't stress the importance of identifying your material. Melody/Theme and motif are important designators to begin with.

A melody, literally, can be anything. In the classical period, it was exemplified in well organized bars based usually on 8 bars (antecedent and consequents.) In the Romantic Period, melodies became longer and more vocal in nature (for example, the famous love theme from Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet.) During the 20th century, the vocal style of the romantic style melody gave way to a far different type of melodic language characterized by jumps, odd meters, etc. I digress, however.

A motif, on the other hand, is a smaller segment that is often used in melody/themes. I've attached an example from Mozart below. We will start with this one and then move on to other works as we get along with these lessons.

In regards to your PDF, I think this will be a very helpful thing for you in helping you identify the basic constituents of your music. Now for the examples!

The first example is from Symphony no. 40 in g minor by Mozart, first movement. The main theme of this is a perfect example of the classical idea of melodic construction. The first 4 1/2 bars represent the antecedent and the last 4 1/2 bars represent the consequent. You'll notice that in this melody, Mozart uses three distinct motives in this melody - these are given his importance by his repetition (within the melody of all three motives).

Here is the full score on IMSLP:

http://imslp.org/wik...fromIndex/00072

Also, for these lessons - since we are devoting time to identifying melody/theme and motives, lets use a separate file aside from your score that we can use to keep track of motives and melodies and break them apart easier (sort of like I have done with the attached file.)Now, what I would like you to do, is to go back over your score and try to identify your melodies and motives and place them on a single page similar to the attachment. Try to deduce your material from what you have. Remember, for now let's just focus on Rehearsal Marks A - D.

Melody_Theme and motive examples.pdf

Okay, hows this?

themesmotives.pdf

Interesting. I think we may have to start from a different angle on this. I put the Mozart example as a means to show how Mozart and the classicists organized their ideas into melody and used motives in that regard. I brought the idea of motif up, because, I see in your work that you use motives. However, you don't use them the same way as Mozart - as I illustrated in my original upload showcasing your motives. So, what we are going to do to better help you understand the idea of melodic construction using motives is a few exercises. Here is what I want:

Come up with four 2 - 3 note motives and post them here. Refer to the example that I posted from Mozart's 40th first movement, you'll see I marked his motives in a measure there own. Set yours similar.

Once we have those, we will talk about ways to create melody from motive.

motives.pdf

Okay, so we're going to start with something very basic: sequence.

To best exemplify sequence, we're going to look at the following:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0b/Sequence_ascending_from_C.png

Here is a very simple illustration of a sequence. Look at the first four eighth notes in the treble clef. You'll notice that it starts on C and ends on F. The next set of four eighth starts on D and ends on G. Then E to A and F to B. This is one means to expand your idea beyond the basic motive.

Now, you can't rely solely on sequence to construct a melody - but you can use it to draw attention to your motive as the above example illustrates.

So, we will use the sequence to extend your motive to 2 bars. This will draw attention to your motif while propelling your idea forward just a tad.

Exercise:

With your motives, create a sequence going up and going down for each.

alright, here goes:

motives.pdf

Great! Now, this is where we have some choices to make. We have here 4 motif's each sequenced to provide a lil more expansion to them. Now we get to make a choice:

1. Do we just want to use these motives as they are?

2. Do we want to add contrast to form these into melody?

3. Do we want to continue these without contrast to form a melody?

These three 'questions' are your next step in the process. Now a little about these:

1. To use just the motives would require more inventive and imaginative uses of the motives. A good reference for this type of choice would be the opening movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. In this symphony, Beethoven uses a 4 note motif throughout the first movement (and of course, in the subsequent 3 movements). This method would treat the motif right from the start.

2. Adding contrast to the motif to create a fuller melody would be easy to do. Taking your material, and then adding 2 more bars that move the material up to dominant (V), would be the means to do this. I'm going to post some examples if you choose this method.

3. This method is what was used in Mozart's 40th Symphony, first movement that I posted above as an example. As you noticed with that, Mozart continuation of the melody move it up and then down (refer to the original.) I would say let's do this method first, as it would be the easiest for you to do.

Referring to the Mozart Example, I want you to create a 4 bar melody utilizing for the first two measures your sequential expansions posted. Add to these a continuation that completes the Antecedent phrase. Try to think of the overall contour or shape that you want. Take your time doing this!

Okay try this one out:thememelody1.pdf

Okay, the first one, I'm not entirely sure on ending it with the whole note... it might work, we'll have to see. The second one, I like the contour going down - very wide range. This one might produce good results, yes? The third one, the fourth beat of the second measure, I would move up to E instead of the C# - just seems a lot more richer that way. The ending is interesting as well. The fourth one, I think is your best - I love that descending movement. So do you have any questions about creating antecedents? If not, we can move on to consequents.

No, antecedents are simple enough, I think. Ready to move on.

Ok, then let's move on to consequents. As we see with the Mozart example, they start similar to the Antecedent BUT they provide a more secure ending in comparison - often with cadence. I'm not to worried about you working a cadence but I would like you to complete your melody by adding the consequent to your antecedents. Use your antecedents and the Mozart example as a guide. If you would like to end on the Tonic note for each, that will work - but won't be required.

I will note, again, this is only one way to construct your melody out of motivic material. I personally feel this is one of the easier to understand methods.

thememelody2.pdf

So, I was on campus yesterday and I thought I would jot down some ideas and show you a few things important in development. Originally, I was going to have you go back and attempt to identify your ideas a little more. Then it sort of hit me, that perhaps we should just work with the melodies you have here.

That said, let's return back to your original motifs. I want to go into some of the other means at which you can manipulate your motives to create melodic material.

We already addressed sequence. So let's go into just working with your motives individually. I found this online reference for you: background. In this study, we most likely will not work with cadences - unless you so desire. Also, we already began looking at phrases (antecedents and consequents). So, on this page, I want you to mainly look at motive variants - as this is more important to you in terms of development.

The following may be used to develop material (note this is not a full list of all the possibilities!):

1. Augmentation: increasing the value of the notes of your motif.
2. Diminution: decreasing the value of the notes of your motif.
3. Inversion: Inverting your motif. 'literally placing it upside down'
4. Retrograde: Writing your motif backward.
5. Fragmentation: the motif is broken into smaller parts, each part playing separate from the others
6. Repetition: repeated literally as it appears
7. Imitation: repeated in a different voice
8. Transposition: transposing your motif to different, often contrasting, regions
9. Deletion: removing note from your motif - stripping it down to it's most important parts
10. ornamentation/embellishment: addition of notes to the original motif (in the form of trills, turns, mordents, etc.)
11. Intervallic Change: change the contour of your motif by change the intervals that it comprises.
12. Sequence: two or more appearances of the motif at a different pitch level, generally stepwise up or down.

Since we used Sequence to extend your motif to create a melody, we will not use this in development (just to make sure you try new things.) As we go into each of these, I will post on here examples of the techniques studied.

So, what I would like to do is have you choose the melody above that you feel you would like to explore and develop (and create into a new short work!) Once chosen, begin a composition using the following instrumentation: Flute, Oboe, Violin 1, Violin 2, Viola, Violoncello, and Contrabass. If you choose to write tonally please be observant of cadences, etc. As these will be important in this context.

motives.pdf I think these are the motives. But I am not sure. :\ It's weird identifying motives....

It is, yes, but it's an important tool to use. I think what we will do now, is to go ahead and have you work with one of the motive based melodies you constructed - and we will let you just start writing something, anything. Now that you have an idea of what a motive is - I think that might be the best thing to do.

I'm sorry it's taking me so long! I've been pretty busy, and on top of that I happen to compose very.... ... ... slowly. :o

I've got about half of it done, I think. I'm getting there! :D

That's fine, just please keep me in the loop on this! I'm very busy these days and would like to know what is up with this. Thanks.

*finally!*

Loss.pdf

http://www.youngcomp...ion?entry=63724