Chapter 2: How I compose

I work in steps.

First, I collect melodic ideas and when I record them I assign them to an instrument, maybe a flute or a cello. I need to edit a lot, because, unlike Mozart — who as he wrote had music appear fully formed in his head only having to arrange it, as he once said — I have to try things out patiently until they feel right.

New melodic ideas pop into my head at all times of the day.  They are usually short fragments.  In order to avoid forgetting them (which will take no time at all sadly) I hum them into my I-Phone.  I have lots and lots of these in my phone at any time.  When I am busy with something specific these ideas still come to me, of course, and I just “rest” them in my phone until later.

At some stage I convert one of these fragments into a score trying to match the notes that I hummed into the phone.  Since I worked for many years in the Software industry in California it was easy for me to get used to software that would allow me to record a score rather than use paper and pen.  13 years ago I started with Sibelius and now use Dorico.  For my purposes these systems make me feel a bit like I felt about Microsoft Word, i.e. too many features, too complicated to allow you to intuitively know how to do something.  I am praying that because of AI things will become a lot easier.  More on this topic in a later chapter on how I would love to be able to compose and in the process create great sounding audio files without having either having to be a sound engineer or having to pay someone to play your compositions.

So I land up with lots of small Dorico files each with a expanded fragment ideas.

Somehow during this process of transcribing them to Dorico I decide which of these fragments I should work on next and make more out of it.

This is where composing starts for me.  I hear the fragment being played via Dorico and additional of new ideas will pop into my head.  In this way a 3 bar fragment can grow into a 24 bar melody, possibly in different versions.  I can’t force this process.  Every time I had tried (because I was frustrated that nothing was going “right”) I landed up throwing away what I had done.

I need to hear the music that I record this way and then somehow I know if it needs changing or not.  This can lead trying this and that until I feel that it needs no more tweaking.  Both Sibelius and Dorico support lots and lots of instruments, of course, but when you ask these systems to play them for you some of them sound pretty terrible.  I learned that the piano sounds very good in comparison and so do the flute and the cello.  Interestingly enough the violin or viola sound not good at all.  Therefore most of my initial compositions start of by being written for the piano, flute or cello before they change.

Next the question comes: what do I do with this idea?  In part that depends on what sentiment the melody expresses. Sometimes it could well lend itself to becoming a song, sometimes it would not make a good song but an interesting piano piece, for example.

I had started composing shortly after my wife had passed away.  I had written a book “Left Behind” about this experience for myself and when I started composing I wanted to express my loss in the form of songs and piano pieces.

So I wrote 3 songs “Why, Just Why”, “Lost Love” and “Thy Will be Done!” Then I wrote 3 piano pieces to slot in between them.

Each of the songs was for soprano and the accompaniment was piano.

I had first started with books on music theory via Amazon.  At that time I had lived for 3 years in Iswatini, a small country next to South Africa where my daughter who was an HIV specialist doctor was spending 3 years and I tagged along to see if she needed any help in the day to day living.  My wife, her Mum had passed away and I decided to retire and come along.

After my daughter went back to England I went to live in Germany and enrolled at a music school at a university and spent 3 years studying as the oldest student in class (I was already over 70 when I took my first course at the university).  All of this was of course very helpful and also a wonderful experience.  I was lucky to get private tuition by one of the lecturers at that university during that time. Music theory and the history of classical music are very interesting all on their own.

In walking distance from where I lived at that time was a sound production company that focused mainly on producing film music.  I was very fortunate  to discover them and work with them and they were instrumental in recording some of the songs and the other recorded music you can find on my website.  They needed to know a lot of musicians in order to record the film music they were composing and recording.  Without them I could never have had this experience.

Mind you, it came with a cost and soon I realised that I could not afford to have my compositions played that way.  That started a whole new journey for me on how to produce audio sound from my compositions that were not as awful as what Dorico could do.  But that is another story which I may go into later when I plan to day dream about how I would love to be able to compose in the future.

It also made sense for me to compose music for only few instruments because of the cost factor should I be willing to pay for it to be performed.  Over time I “graduated” to composing for a string quartet. Paying for 4 musicians to play something is 4 times more than paying for a solo performer.  Therefore all my later compositions which have been for string quartets have had the computer generated sound but with special treatment from my friend Tobias who has been using a variety of software to improve on what Dorico and SoundPerformer can do.

Because of my love for Baroque music and Bach in particular I was of course aware of Counterpoint and Polyphony.  This is why already in my early compositions I enjoyed looking for ways to apply this.  For example I would try to get the right hand of the piano to play one melodic idea and have the left hand play another and then a bit later to switch them around.

Doing that sort of thing appealed to me but it was only when I started composing for 3 and for 4 instruments that I became fascinated with understanding better how different voices can come together to create a deeper impact on the listener.

Reviewing compositions from famous composers can teach a lot of course.  I found this very interesting in various classes I was taking at University. Of course, I did not want my compositions to turn into bad copies of one of those famous composers.  This is why I spent more than 2 years composing only for octatonic scales so that nobody could say I was a bad imitator of some famous composer.-:)

The bottom line is that when you are engaged in finding your own style you will have to start from scratch again in deciding why and how you want to bring different voices together in your own compositions. I guess you are supposed to find your way via trial and error, hoping that you can learn from your own mistakes.

This learning and growing process fascinates me.

Having spent a lot of time and effort reworking my prior compositions to bring out my mobile App it was great to get back into composing new pieces.  I had noticed in some of the work I did for the App that even when I composed for a string quartet I would be quite happy that only 2 of the 4 instruments to be playing something for part of the composition.  I asked myself if I should rather keep all instruments busy doing something all the time?

If I have 2 polyphonic ideas that work well together in a section of a composition then I am comfortable in giving them to only 2 instruments to play.  I know that I could try to apply harmony in order to make the other 2 instruments also be part of that aspect of the composition but in general I preferred to at least try to make each instrument do something “different” when they were all playing together. I can’t say that I managed to always do this successfully and did sort of “fit” things together at times to get all the instruments to play together.

I find that polyphonic composing appeals to me probably due to a life time love of baroque music and in particular Bach.  Thinking back on some of my compositions I feel that I could have been more rigorous in applying a polyphonic approach at times in a composition.

So I decided to start experimenting and learn from these experiments.  In order to do so I would need to make notes about what I was trying to do and then make an effort to review it and try to learn from it. Onwards and forwards! -:)

So the idea of a book came into being as a way for me to be motivated to pay my dues on learning from what I was doing