Questionnaire For Composers

Hi all, I am currently studying a music degree and i need to get different composers views on how they compose. My research project is about the compositional devices and techniques that different composers use in order to convey specific emotions and metaphors to the audience, all music should evoke some sort of emotion within the listener and my research project is dedicated to finding out how composers manage to do this.

There are 4 questions to this questionnaire and if you could spare some time to share some of your knowledge I would greatly appreciate it and it would help my project immensely!

These are the 4 questions:

 1.Which elements of composition do you find are the most effective with regards to conveying emotion and feeling through your music? Instrumentation, tempo, key/mode, time signatures/time change, arrangement etc.? Please explain why you find these effective.

2.Do you find any of the above elements particularly effective when trying to convey a specific emotion such as anger, Love or sadness etc.? Why do you find these so effective?

3.How much interaction is there between yourself and the director of the film which you are composing for? Does the director offer much input regarding the music and why do you feel the director offers this input (if any)?

4.What compositional advice would you give anyone who was faced with the challenge of conveying thoughts and emotions through their music?

If you can manage the time to help me out with my project by answering these questions you would be helping me out a great deal! Thanks for your time

I don't think you're going to get much help here in the Advice and Techniques subforum. Well, I'll answer anyways.

1. To be quite honest, I don't find any of those particularly effective. Of them the most effective, or least ineffective, would probably be tempo, because it's somewhat difficult to convey, for example, passionate fury in larghissimo. But you can do so many different things using the same element of composition. I usually include written instructions for what emotion should be conveyed because the score itself is so insufficient.

2. As said, tempo is probably the most effective at conveying different degrees of passion. But again, I'm iffy about even calling tempo very effective.

3. I don't really like how this question assumes you're composing for film. Nowhere in this post do you specify you're looking for film composers, so it's implied that it's just a given that you're composing for a film rather than for the love of writing music. I myself didn't take it that personally, but I don't think it's too far-fetched that others here have. (In any case, I haven't ever written for a film, so I can't answer.)

4. Don't overstress about simply writing "dolce" on your score and calling it a day.