Looking for Tips to Start Composing

Hey everybody! I'm new to this forum so this is my first post. I am an organist and accordionist and recently started composing my own music because, you know, why not? I enjoy doing it, but have had some trouble recently so I am looking for some advice on how I can improve. I am trying to compose in a baroque style, sort of like my two favorite composers, Bach and Vivaldi. I am trying some "simple" forms currently, like minuets and chorales. They don't sound terrible to my ears, but I know that there is lots of room to improve. The files are attached if you would like to help me out. (thank you!!)

My first question is: How can I come up with good ideas (and continue the ideas)? Sometimes when I try to compose I just get nothing and end up deleting my work out of frustration.

My second question is: How can I eventually build my way up to compose more complex things? I have tried other forms and some more complex music, but am unable to make anything sound natural. 

If anyone can help me out with this that would be great. I can't thank the people who do enough.

Thanks again everyone!

You're really good for just starting to compose. Sure put a smile on my face 🙂 

Minuet 1 was a favorite! Keep composing!

Hi @lucasa223. Can you provide scores we can look at?

Hi @lucasa223,

Welcome to the forum!

I think the chorale is quite good! The harmony there is standardized SATB.

I feel like the minuet 2 has too many parallel octaves in the first part, but overall it's a good attempt.

I like the minuet 1 most like @HtWinsor even if it's short, since the harmonic progression is smooth and the mood is graceful which fits a minuet.

10 hours ago, lucasa223 said:

My first question is: How can I come up with good ideas (and continue the ideas)? Sometimes when I try to compose I just get nothing and end up deleting my work out of frustration.

I think every idea can be good idea if you drill on it and develop them. There's no bad idea, but not idea undeveloped. Brahms is criticized by Wolf on how simple and commonplace his ideas are, but actually this is what makes Brahms a legend on motivic development, since he always treats those motivic skeletons with magical hands and transformed them to great pieces.

10 hours ago, lucasa223 said:

My second question is: How can I eventually build my way up to compose more complex things? I have tried other forms and some more complex music, but am unable to make anything sound natural. 

 

You have to get more familiar with formal structure of music, like drill on the larger forms like Sonata form, rondo form etc. Reading books on the subject and analyze the scores with intention with form helps you with that. Enrich your harmonic language will be great too. Another method is, look into the posts of our members!! There are many different styles here and I'm sure you can learn many from them.

Thanks for sharing and joining us!

Henry

@muchen_ Yeah of course, I attached the scores to this reply. Also just a note, I fixed some of the parallel octaves on Minuet 2 like @Henry Ng Tsz Kiu mentioned, so the score is a bit different from the audio in the original post.

Welcome to the forum Lucas!

"How can I come up with good ideas?"

That's the age old problem for artists of every type of art; from poets to tattoo artists. Every composer has their own way of approaching this. You might be inspired by a chord progression, or a fragment of a melody, or hear a beautiful hymn and want to create your own. I think when you are confronted by an empty, lifeless manuscript paper, or a newly-created, empty midi file it can be a bit daunting. No different than a poet sat by candlelight with his quil and ink pot faced with the infinite expanse of his plain empty paper.

But, there is music in you! You said your favourite composers were Bach and Vivaldi, they too would have had this problem from time to time. How did they come up with good ideas? An empty stomach sure is a good motivator for an aspiring young composer, they didn't have much choice but to face the frustration and dig deep.

You may have 10 ideas but only one of them is any good. It's a bit like mining for diamonds on Minecraft, you'll dig through a lot of rock before you find anything of value and that's OK.

When Haydn heard Mozarts six string quartets he remarked that Mozart had such good taste. He didn't say how clever his music is, or how beautiful his harmony, he referred to his taste, meaning his ability to discern good ideas from  bad ideas. That's interesting. The question could be reframed, "How do I discern good ideas from bad ideas?"

That takes 10,000 hours of experience, trial and error, perhaps talent too. There are so many unfinished fragments from the great composers, you won't get to listen to them on the radio, but if you did you'd realise they had this issue too. Although to be fair, their castoffs are of such good quality, but they were chasing a higher art form, that us, as beginners needn't concern ourselves with.

To point you in the right direction reflect on the fact that a motif is the unit of thought in music. We can all hum or sing a short musical idea, try it. The motif from Beethoven's fifth da da da daa. From that idea sprung a symphony. If you try to invent an entire melody spontaneously it most likely wouldn't make much musical sense.

So come up with many short one or two bar ideas, let's say 5 of them, then with you watchmakers eye, scrutinise them and cast off fools gold and keep the one that you believe is half decent at least. Then develop the idea, maybe come up with 5 more ideas that develop it to 4 bars. Delete 4 again, keep 1. 

Another way to tackle this problem is to have goals and constraints. Choose a form, let's say a minuet, do some research to see how long they typically are, do they typically modulate at the end of the first 8 bars? What chord do composers typically use at the beginning of the B section? How long are B sections? How much material from the A section do they use in the B section? Once you have an inderstanding of a typical baroque minuet that will create constraints which will narrow the infinite expanse of possibilities.

Then, what mood do you want to create? Some minuets are quite sad, some are pompous, some are naive and playful. Again, that will create a limiting constraint. Then, what key would suit the style of minuet? Grave but dignified might suit G minor for example.

Little by little, constraint by constraint, you will build a discerning ear that will cut down any roots of mysical ideas that clearly do not fit the mould. 

In the beginning, being a composer is more akin to learning to juggle than a brooding artist trying to put his soul on paper for the world to admire. Its a craft no different than that of a bricklayer building a house or a blacksmith fashioning a horse shoe. Art comes later once you're a master of the craft.

Apprentice yourself to others on here that are a little further down the path. We are all really helpful, we were all absolute beginners at one point. 

If you would like me to take a more critical eye to your scores I can help you learn a few rules that will help guide you and point out a few errors? I found that helpful when I first started uploading scores on here.

Darren

Me again.

I didn't answer your second question. "How can I build up to more complex forms?"

In the beginning, I would concentrate on ABA form. You could have 8 bars for the A section, 8/10/12 or 16 bars for the B section and then back to 8 bars of A. 

A=8 bars (modulating to dominant)

B=8 to 16 bars (modulating to tonic)

A=8 bars (staying in tonic, this will mean adapting your original A section to end on the tonic)

Write in different keys each time and try out different time signatures.

If you compose for the flute it sounds quite good on midi. Get good at composing short melodies. Don't be afraid to compose inferior music, you have to be comfortable being 'the fool' before you can be 'the master'. Thats a Jordan Peterson quote.

I'm still a fool, I'm composing minuets, marches and other short forms, they are approaching 'good' in terms of quality but I have a long way to go before they sound anywhere near authentic and that's OK. 

To learn to juggle you begin with two soft unbreakable objects! Then you add a third, and a fourth etc. We would all love to be composing fugues like Bach or sonatas like Beethoven but we have to be realistic. They had the luxury of excellent instruction, hours upon hours of playing, and the need to make a living doing it. For most of us it's a hobby, we have limited time and limited instruction (textbooks can only take you so far). You can study juggling theory from a book but you have to keep dropping the ball in practice, over and over again. 

The typical place people begin is short form on piano. If you want to compose in the baroque style, Fux counterpoint study or any derivative of his work is a place to begin. From there you can add counterpoint to your melodies. Personally I think the classical style is easier to begin with because you can create melodies and add an alberti bass. That's just my opinion though and I'm sure others have theirs.

Get good at melodies with an understanding of the implied harmony. If you play the organ you can add the chords under your melodies while you play them. 

Sometimes I hear piano music on hear and it's obvious the composer doesn't play and that they wrote for both hands simultaneously as they went. If you isolate the melody it's not so great and that would be obvious to them too if they heard it.

First comes the melody, then the bass line, then the middle voices. If you're a genius maybe it all comes at once but to us mere mortals, it's like building a house. There's a process and isolating one aspect and to get good at it the way footballers practice penalties over and over is the best way forward. The impatient among us may disagree!

It's fun to try complex forms but they'd get torn to shreds, or worse, ignored, by the fugue experts on here lol. I'm kidding, but it would be like drawing a stick man as an adult and putting it up on the fridge, people would be confused.

In conclusion, study melody writing, there are a few rules that'll help you out to create catchy tunes. Put your melodies in ABA form. Play them at the organ with chords underneath. Study counterpoint along side this effort then you'll be able to add a second voice to create convincing baroque music in short forms.

Darren

@Papageno Thank you for your advice! I'll definitely keep working on these things, especially the melodies and the ABA form you suggested. Thanks again

Would you like me to take a look at your scores and point out anything that seems foreign to the style? 

@Papageno Sure!

If you want to compose in the baroque style, the most logical thing to do would be to research how composers like Bach learned how to compose when they were young and then for you to use the same pedagogical methods that they did.

J.S. Bach himself taught his students in this way: his students would learn how to harmonize chorale melodies which they would be given. At first, Bach would provide a bass part to the given chorale melody and the students would have to fill in the tenor and alto parts. Later on, the students had to compose the bass part themselves.

But more importantly, composition students in the Baroque era were taught the practice of thorough-bass. This was an accompanimental practice where the keyboardist was given a bass part (played in the left hand) that included figures which indicated which harmonies to play in the right hand. This right-hand part was essentially improvised (but in accordance with the underlying harmonic structure and the rules of composition). The student was required to learn the principles of composition (voice-leading, preparing and resolving dissonance, etc.) so thoroughly that he was able to apply them in real-time when improvising these thorough-bass accompaniments. The whole point of composition students learning this practice was so they assimilated the rules of composition so thoroughly that they became second-nature.

There are various treatises which teach one how to learn the practice of thorough-bass, but perhaps most relevant is Friedrich Erhard Niedt's "The Musical Guide". There is evidence that J.S. Bach used this treatise when teaching his students. Besides this, you can find plenty of modern resources on this subject as well.

As for the best way to improve your skill at composition, it would no doubt be through practicing the skill of improvisation; a skill which many of the greatest composers excelled at (including Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven). Learning how to improvise is like learning how to speak a language fluently (as opposed to merely learning how to read and write in that language). The more you practice improvisation, the more naturally that musical ideas will come to you. Improvisation is a powerful tool to generate musical ideas, allowing you to try out different ideas very rapidly, allowing you to hear them in real-time before you write those ideas down. Improvisation is a skill like any other in that it needs to be practiced; you get better at improvisation through actually practicing it. If you have not practiced improvisation before, start by trying to improvise very simple melodies, making use of just the I and V chords, then move on to more complex ideas as you gain experience.

This was the advice that C.P.E. Bach gave: to become a good composer, it's better to learn how to be great at improvisation than to study the rules of composition (that is, studying through reading and written exercises). This was his reasoning: if you become great at improvisation, then it's merely a matter of writing down what you improvise at the keyboard in order to make a composition out of that improvised material. However, if you were only to learn the rules of composition through reading and written exercises, then you still wouldn't have gained the invaluable skill of improvisation through this kind of study. In other words, you naturally learn the rules of good composition by learning how to improvise well.

If you have any questions about anything I mentioned, feel free to ask.

Hi, Kevin

You pretty much summed up my approach to composition! I didn't know others thought as I did. It is indeed a language and no textbook can replace sitting at a keyboard instrument.

I would also add that midi software is great, but it's a trap. Use it for multi-instrument composition but use pencil and paper for keyboard work. If you can't play the piano, compose and learn at the same time. That's what I'm doing.

Compose easy to play music and as your ability progresses, so will the complexity and difficult of your compositions. As your learn to play a new piece, learn from it. I learned to compose just by playing JCF Bach's musical leisure hour book. From there I bought minuets from Haydn and Mozart. They use all the musical schemas and they are clear to see and understand. 

Darren

9 hours ago, Papageno said:

I would also add that midi software is great, but it's a trap. Use it for multi-instrument composition but use pencil and paper for keyboard work. If you can't play the piano, compose and learn at the same time. That's what I'm doing.

Compose easy to play music and as your ability progresses, so will the complexity and difficult of your compositions. As your learn to play a new piece, learn from it. I learned to compose just by playing JCF Bach's musical leisure hour book. From there I bought minuets from Haydn and Mozart. They use all the musical schemas and they are clear to see and understand.

Even when composing a multi-instrument work, it's still often best to work it out on the keyboard first - at least for the outer parts (bass and soprano) and then later arrange it for different instruments. This is what I and many other composers do.

But yes, if you use midi software, you won't be able to quickly try out different musical ideas like you would by improvising at the keyboard. The faster that you come up with and discard bad ideas, the quicker that you'll eventually come up with a good idea to expand upon.

Often, I will compose the entire "rough draft" of a composition at the keyboard, and then I will plug the rough draft into Finale, then, making use of the playback feature in Finale, I'll make some changes to the composition here and there to polish it up.

I should add that when students in the Baroque era were being taught how to play thorough-bass at the keyboard, they were only just starting to learn how to play the keyboard as well. Some teachers at that time even taught students how to play thorough-bass before they learned any full solo pieces for keyboard. This is because thorough-bass was considered the foundation of music (teaching one the fundamentals of composition) and a prerequisite to learning how to play music in general.

Yes, when learning how to compose and improvise, one should begin with simple musical ideas (simple harmonically and structurally) that are easy to play. I have attached a few tiny pieces I composed which exemplify the kind of pieces that I'm talking about; the kind of pieces that beginners at composition should compose.

When learning how to compose by studying the works of others, it's important to study works which are not too complex musically for your own skill level. You mentioned the easy pieces by J.C.F. Bach. I, personally, have used the pieces in the Notebook of Anna Magdalena Bach to study composition from. I have used these small pieces as models for my own compositions. For instance, I have composed several arias using BWV 515 as a model as well as using BWV Anhang 132 as a model for menuets.