Your selected techniques

Some composers are very secretive about their craft, I think that is selfish and a stupid game for composers and analysts to play.

Here I share the techniques that define the music I'm composing now, most of them are well known but still.

• Polychords and Polymodes:

1. Take two or more scales on the same or different tonics.
2. Label the scale degrees.
3. Build common chords (tertian, quartal, secundal, etc) on top of each degree.
4. Rank the notes of each chord according to the importance you want to give them, I usually rank root > perfect fifth > minor third > perfect fourth
5. Combine the notes from the same degrees from the two scales, ranking higher the notes that repeat.

• Pedals

1. Any note of high rank in the mode can act as a pedal.
2. The principal chords also make good pedals.

• Melody and Progressions:

1. Any melody that uses the high ranking notes of the polymode as goalposts can be the structural basis of the work.
2. Any harmonic progression that follows the patterns of the melody in any direction is good.
3. Harmonic sequences derived from repeatedly transposed sections of the patterns are also good.
4. Only highly dissonant notes require resolution, conventional or otherwise.

• Doubling:

1. Melodies can be doubled at any general interval that the chords allow.
2. They can be doubled to form entire chords.
3. The chords can move in parallel since their only purpose is thickening and colouring the line.
4. More than one melody can be doubled this way but more than three at the same time is so muddy the melodies become unhearable.

• Rhythm and Metre:

1. Schemes of either can be pitch-associated or not.
2. Douple time is better for rest, triple for movement and odd for instability. 
3. Even rhythms generate rest, odd ones different kinds of movement.
4. Syncopation by suspension pushes the music back.
5. Off-beat syncompation does the opposite.
6. Tuplets generate a floating/free feeling of time inside them.
7. Polyrhythms that can be clearly discerned enrich a texture, if they cannot they generate an atmosphere.

• Texture:

1. All four types stand equal footing but:
2. Long Monophony needs to be extremely varied in durations and metre, otherwise it is boring.
3. Heterophony needs to be more elaborate each layer, almost by definition, to a lesser level than monophony.
4. Homophony can be more simple, specially when dealing with complex chords, though metrical changes are still most welcome.
5. All polyphony is good, the more characteristic the individual melodies the better.

• Development

1. Every developmental technique compatible with the above is allowed, some are:
2. Augmentation and Diminution of intervals and/or durations.
3. Insertion and deletion of notes.
4. Fragmentation into motifs of longer melodies and progressions.
5. Permutations of any of the materials.
6. Modulation and transposition into other polymodes.
7. Serialisation of different materials or paramenters of the piece. 
8. Pitch multiplication
9. Retrogradation and Inversion
10. Imitation, Canons and Fugues

Hope you found any of this interesting or helpful, and share your own selection with us please! 

Certainly interesting.

But perhaps I've lived too sheltered a life. There's probably some truth in what you say because it can take a lot of work to winkle out how a composer achieved something especially if no score is available. Most technical secrets I've leaned came from score study and (limited) cultural study. If I want to find out how she/he did it? I get hold of the score. 

But that assumes some facility with score reading which takes practice; and a score is available which too often it isn't. So it can mean concentrated, repeated listening and analysing what's going on at the point of focus in a piece. 

There's no secret to my stuff as I provide a score. (I once worried about plagiarism but less now as my stuff is modern and unlikely to fall victim to that. Even so, I register everything with the PRS.)

I use the orchestra as an artist might a paint box.  Given to synaesthesia, I'll paint a mood rather than a program telling a story or "photorealistic" scene.  I'm ok with theory inasmuch as it's needed - and while I write basically tonally, I carefully manage dissonance and "remote consonances" as Schönberg called them. If a note is in the harmonic series of the root's fundamental up to the 15th harmonic, it's game!

But now, I forget about time signature and key signature. Interestingly, Chopin (the site owner) recently remarked it's easier to read, written in a constant time signature than keep changing time signatures even if the rhythmic pattern suggests them. Unless it's likely to be a constant compound time throughout, my stuff is in 4/4. But it'll only ever touch a small audience. As long as it makes some kind of sense I'm happy.... but to me the real secret is "does the finished work meet the objectives I started out with? I'm fairly self-critical so when I sit back and review it a month later, is it really what I hoped it would do (for me, anyway)?   Alas, too often it doesn't.  

Well I don't think about technique when I'm composing. I just want to do what's need to be done for the music. I learn everytime when I write and certainly don't "use" them to write. When I get outside of my music ans start analyzing them it becomes analysis and not composing and it always fail for me.

Fux can gather the rules Palestrina used to write, but I am certain Palestrina didn't have this rule in his mind when composing since they are internalized and unnoticed when composing. If it's noticed the composing process will be disturbed.

It's always wonder when I analyze my music aftermath since I can't believe they are composed by me.

Henry

Yes, like the other replies so far, I just write what the music requires.  Once I have decided firmly what a section should sound like, I go back and analyze it to be sure that key signatures are correct, accidentals are spelled correctly, and conduct my way through it to decide if I have a bar in a different meter thrown in the middle somewhere, or if a fermata is the better way to show what I want.  But I don't write with particular intention.  If I analyze as I start to wind down with a piece, and see that with the addition of a single note I can have a ______ chord, I will try that out, but I'm much more likely to have written the whole thing, and then look back and see that it's in gypsy minor.  

I write the first handful of bars, and then may decide to shift up or down a key, if I feel I will want more room to add higher or lower notes, and am going to run out of space given the voices I'm writing for in the current key.  

I don't think:  I should add a hemiola.  I think:  next it should go like this, and then this, and then this...  At at some point, when I'm satisfied with what I have and look back at it, I see that I added a hemiola.  Or that I have changed meter.  Or that some added chromaticism has evolved into a full change of key.  

When I DO really consciously use a technique, it is generally because I have been enjoying someone else's piece that does a certain thing, and want to apply it to my own current composition.  Or because I've gotten stuck about where the music should go next, and it feels like it is time for a shift in the character of the piece:  this idea has run its course, it's time to shake things up, but I'm stuck.... Can I invert some of my thematic material?  Would a sudden key change be exciting?  Change of tempo?  

But mainly, the music knows where it wants to go, and I just have to have a quiet space to work and enough time, so I can listen to it.  

All that said, things I seem to do a lot:  play with different modes, write in 6/8, texture shifts between homophony and polyphony, use the addition and subtraction of voices to change the overall dynamic, instead of writing in a dynamic change.  None of this is particularly novel. 🙂

When I write I first get a hankering for a specific type/genre: overture, paino quartet, flute concerto...

   I then LISTEN to as much music in that form/period/style as I can, and get ahold of scores/ examine them.

  I then start thinking about/writing down melodic themes, A/B/A or whatever is required.   

   When it gets to writing, I'm at the keyboard, and use Mozart's method:  MELODY, THEN BASS, then fill in inner voice.  This is paper and pencil at this point.

  I try to get chord strucutre, progression, stacking right at this time as far as I can.

   I then paper and pencil an outline fo the movement/piece utilizing the melodic material ( something like   (Expo: D major:  A, A1, (at V: B, B1, codetta, Dev: statement of A1 at V, modulate to rel. minor (F).   etc...

  Then:

    Im at the computer, with Print music, shaping a first pass effort at  my outline.   This is the longest portion.  Misteps, learing how my imagination NEEDS to appear on the score, failed ideas, get hashed out.  Revisions to  outline.   

        As with others here, I let the melodic ideas determine chord progressions, and form determine modulations, iterations.