How Do You Structure Your Music?

[Alex Dunn]

I was always taught about structure in purely musical terms like sonata form or binary form etc. I was wondering if there are any composers out there who think about structuring their pieces in other ways, like painting a picture, or writing a story?

[Alex Dunn]

Thanks for your reply, H. Archibald. It's nice to hear your opinions as I think they are helpful. I do think structure is very important. If a piece is poorly structured, it will not affect the listener in the way you want. I liked how you said it is 'the drama of one's composition'.

[Luigi]

I am still learning about structure,but it seems to me that it's hard to go wrong if one has learned the traditional system. I hope to learn it sooner than later.....for now I am still experimenting with motives,phrases and periods,but man,I don't know what I would give to learn all this faster. I think that the study of form is the greatest thing to study about music 'theory'.

Even Stravinsky,in a book he wrote,seemed to be a lot more for structure and order,than against it. To be honest,the idea to look at a painting and ramble on musically,does not really grab me. But the idea that I'd look at a painting and draw inspiration and motivation from it to compose a piece,with the skills I have learned,is very attractive to me. I am pretty much traditionally-minded when it comes to structure....for example,I don't like some jazz music,it seems to me too 'rambling'. But I have never heard a classical composer or someone who studied formal structure,fail to strike me with the structure of his music. I just love to hear 'ingegnious' musical structure....the way one single main idea is developed,nurtured,shaped in many ways.....that's what I love about traditional structure. I like the idea of precise purpose. I don't know if this idea is good or not,I guess I'll have to see it for myself

I think I would compose 'like painting a picture' only after I'd exaust all my knowledge about traditional structure. I mean,how many sonatas or rondos can one write? To me structure is the real secret of music.

[Gregory Alan Turner]

I often structure music IntroABABCAB or more simply IntroABABCB. If I want it more complex then I include transitions in various places. IntroATBCAB, Intro ABCATB etc...

[Alex Dunn]

My biggest worry is making sections flow nicely. Sometimes I listen to my pieces and can tell when I switched from the A section to the B section. I think the best music shifts and progresses without the listener noticing. It's hard to do. I got a really great bit of advice from a college lecturer and that is 'try having your musical ideas away from the keyboard'.

I got stuck relying on my hands to discover where the music wanted to go. Now I'm more inclined to listen to the song in my head and make up the next section in my head too. Because in your head you can hear things that your hand are unable to play. I think you free up the creative side of your brain that way.

[Jan Civil]

In purely musical terms. I personally never begin with trying to fill a formal container in any preconceived way (other than maybe the idea itself, a melody or the rhythm of the lyric). Such as even a song form. I have songs, but I wouldn't say to myself, 'this is going to be verse/verse/bridge/chorus'. That's just me, I don't force an idea to come into the world, I'm not 'in labor' usually that I'm aware of either.

Like in a song with the basis in words, it's going to be about the rhythm oftimes. Then I find out about what the time is that supports that rhythm, naturally. And play with how it scans. I don't start with prescribed changes and have that dictate a tune either. If it's a melodic base, sometimes I find chord-objects will support it and give it movement... or not. Sometimes a linear sort of contrapuntal texture is best. But, I'm not trying to satisfy anyone else as an initiative in the act of composing at this point, at all. So, I'm 'free'. {If I can't be free, I could get to be very very cheap!}

I improvise. I like to start with NOTHING in mind. If there is an idea, it has its own 'narrative', its own backstory or bible, its own rules to play by. You can get in the way of an idea. It's a fine line sometimes, I 'know' that this motif can develop, and I have it in my head to make it do these tricks, but it might have its own ideas which are better, and I have to allow it to run.

[Chuck Lucy Finale]

Post punk, post metal, post punk, post anything is focused heavily on a 2-6 chord progression, that slowly builds over the course of 5 to 10 minutes. I have some tunes that are ABCABCD. I get bored easily and tend to not repeat sections. I have some tunes that are loop based. Players play their bars whenever they want at any time (as long as they start on beat 1). I like shifting time signatures and overlapping sections. Maybe the brass will change time signatures and even key while the woodwinds stick to what they were doing.

[Chris Alpiar]

Rules and structure are very important to study - it saves you immense amounts of time and helps you not to re-invent the wheel over and over. However all the rules, once you understand them, the history, how they have been used, are also very important to forget and let your intuition drive you. I spent many years learning musical forms and harmony, really trying to dig into tradition and history - from Gregorian Chant to Dagomba drumming from Ghana to 12 tone atonality to post-bop jazz, etc. Growth as a musician and as a writer comes from learning voraciously. Once you stop learning and once you think "I am the stuff!" then its over - you stagnate and become obsolete. But there is a dichotomy between study, history and tradition with creativity, invention and being a scientist in how you approach music, and often times its a hard one to bridge. 98% of composers and musicians get stuck and hung up in one side or the other (usually the historian side but not always) and so its really important to cognitively understand both and to be at peace with both when trying to soul search for truth through music and create your own. Sorry its not exactly what you asked about but I think its relevant.

[Chris Alpiar]

How do you achieve 'nothing' Jan? Are you into TM or something? I have a hard time with that, and its a big reason I rarely ever listen to the radio or music at all anymore when I am in writing mode. (I do try and keep current and revisit my favorites periodically, but its usually when I have put down the pencil for a bit)

[Jan Civil]

I don't listen to music which would relate to what I do when I'm working. I don't consume a lot of any kind of media at the current time. (I've had a lot of input over half a century round here.) I'm heavily into a series of projects, some is post for some things which are mixed not so well (nightmares), some is new; even when it's supposed to get me from this texture to the other texture, like a general plan, I go awry, I'm sort of not sane.

Right now, the way I'm going to do new compos, is to start with pure sound design, long tones, which develop, just getting in the sound and mucking about. The sound might gets noisy...Then I might begin to subtract. I smear some tones on the timeline, and sort of blindly go about improvising. I do have instruments and combos I have a workflow with. It's like balancing objects of varying weights, a rhythm will have a weight like a material does, like a 'metal index'. Ray Dio, began as dark ambient, or something, I didn't put much of a saddle on that horse.

I have a sort of gift for blind cluelessness. I know a whole lot of vocabulary, but I can get in a state of not having the first idea of what something would be called. Like I can't even tell you what note, it's just balancing shapes. I have a real good relative ear and years of free improv background (and we did some big drugs in those days). LONG TONES can really chill you out, I don't have a discipline to refer to but, long tones is meditation, just listening to something which has a super long envelope and building it by ear. Absynth! Is a drug for me now.

It isn't exactly nothing, but it's close. The instruments are early decisions. but the sonority in the build determined those in the first place, and that was kind of pure.

As someone who can write a narrative, what I found out was, you get some backstory for a character and then the other character, they talk to each other, you have to listen to that more than your preconception of what they might say. EG: A slap bass and a clavinet, have personalities by dint of their physicality; you put them in a sonic space and they will act it out.

Cf. Pauline Oliveras: Deep Listening.

[Jan Civil]

I am kind of retarded, literally kind of slow. I could never have made viable bebop for instance. I did get some things, I had a great impressionistic, and a decent romantic vocabulary, but I did not want to go on and on satisfying the formal strictures, after a point.

You have Debussy, when he started out, had a hard time doing what everybody else did, he didn't get right into the academy like you expect someone of his talent; revolting against Wagner, he made his own forms... he did not write a lot in sonata form... when he did his opera, it broke from tradition.

You look at, say, Ornette Coleman, same deal, just never quite could play normal, just you can have your own ear, or get bored too easily.

I've had form 'n analysis, I wouldn't do without it personally, learned a lot having to write a paper on a Bach Fugue. Why in the world would I want to replicate that second hand except to suss a learning curve, it's been done, not gonna improve on, life's short...

It's like Wynton Marsalis the historian, kind of who cares, to me.

[Miles to John McLaughlin: I want you to play here like you don't even know how to play your gittar.]

[Ann Williams]

I'm sorry, but I have to laugh at what I see here to be irony--I learned the sonata form in theory class via Mendelssohn's A Midsummer's Night Dream...couldn't be any more programmatic, highly structured and an example of solid structural framework as any "absolute" music, if not more so.
Then again, this all goes back to the general topics of Education & Audience.
To play the devil's advocate, I think it is reversed: "What sounds bad, IS bad"! (or as my grandpa used to say, "there's no accountin' for taste")

[Chris Rodier]

much like I hate forms in literature (Shakespearian sonnet for example) I do not like forms like that in music. All you can change in a S.S. is the words... the rhymes must be the same and the syllables, and how many lines... same in music, all you can change is the pitches..

I haven't studied musical form exclusively yet but I will and will take from it what i use.