Good book on composing?

[arkmabat]

Hi, I've made some short, silly songs and just got my feet wet but I'm stuck on how to make longer, more developed songs. I'm looking for a good book on composition. Any suggestions welcome.

[Michael L]

I recommend "Making Music" by Dennis deSantis, in print or ebook. Dennis is a composer who writes the Ableton manuals and videos. It does not bog you down in theory but focuses on solving specific problems in electronic music creation. For example, there are three chapters on Creating Variations. Ableton published the book and shares free sample chapters, but it is DAW-agnostic.

[jancivil]

I've never heard of a book on composing. It can't be taught afaic. What you can do, however is look for material on form, on linear writing in polyphony or counterpoint and some courses in part writing in order to get the chops a composer uses together. Book, I don't know about though, sorry. I was fortunate to get two wonderful [part-writing mostly] courses in schools.

[acYm]

you've never heard of Gradus Ad Parnassum? it can be taught, has been for a few centuries now...

[jancivil]

That's a pretty limited thing to be called a 'book on composing' in anything like a general sense. Or strict sense, frankly.

It's species counterpoint exercises and the music that's going to be its result is extremely limited.

Really snarky tone, and actually really unresponsive to the actual enquiry and to what I said.

[jancivil]

and, at any rate that I said I don't know of any books has no bearing on whether there are such books.
Learning to compose is not something I see as deriving from a book. That's a statement of a viewpoint and it's from a certain experience.

To be fair, Fux wrote that he sought: "to invent a simple method by which a student can progress, step by step, to the heights of compositional mastery...". Well, maybe some people believe in statements like that. I wouldn't be one of them.

Fux's book teaches a technique some find very valuable. In subsequent times, let alone in 2017 I don't think it's really going to cut it as a composition course in and of itself. That seems a little like taking Strunk's The Elements of Style as something that through itself creates writers out of students.

No, I think one needs to get one's technical side together, definitely but my experience is that asking people to teach you composition runs the risk of having them teach how they compose. I may be wrong, but let me give an example. I was close to someone that studied composition with John Adams and then David Sheinfeld. From what I received of that by proxy is this was about mastering particular techniques, not how to compose. My experience with 'Arkmabat' here is he's more at the beginning of the journey than that in the first place.

[jancivil]

This

20th Century Harmony - Persichetti pdf
is good for vocabulary and materials

[ghettosynth]

I recommend "Making Music" by Dennis deSantis, in print or ebook. Dennis is a composer who writes the Ableton manuals and videos. It does not bog you down in theory but focuses on solving specific problems in electronic music creation. For example, there are three chapters on Creating Variations. Ableton published the book and shares free sample chapters, but it is DAW-agnostic.

Yes, at the very least, read through the free chapters and ask yourself if this is insightful or old news. The best way to get where you going is very much dependent on where you are. If you are trying to create contemporary electronic music and there are new ideas for you here, then this is far more likely to be useful to you at this point than books that target more traditional views on learning composition.

https://makingmusic.ableton.com/about

[dermichl]

William Russo - Composing Music was of some help for me...

[ghettosynth]

William Russo - Composing Music was of some help for me...

+1, if you're disciplined enough to use the exercises to learn from.

With respect to Desantis' book, I really like this quote from an interview with Desantis who is "classically trained." This highlights why it's important to define your goals with respect to music and let that help you choose your entry point.

The rest of the interview is a worthwhile read.

You come, as I do, from a training in music composition and theory. To me, a lot of that clearly informs what you’re doing here. Where did that classical training inform what’s here? Is there a translation process for people who didn’t come from that technique and language – but who might benefit from the ideas?

The most obvious place is in the chapters that are heavily devoted to music theory. I mostly just thought about stripping away everything except the absolute most essential components. When I learned harmony it was via things like four-part chorale exercises, which I think is completely unnecessary for the way electronic musicians are working today, and probably unnecessary for learning how harmony works in general. In the context of the traditional conservatory model of harmony instruction, the chapters in my book probably look too stripped down. But I’ve heard from a number of early readers that they finally “get” the concept of functional harmony for the first time, and I’d like to think this validates my approach.

Besides the theory-heavy chapters, there are a number of more abstract concepts I learned from traditional composition training, about topics like motivic development, creating variations to expand a small amount of material into something larger, etc. These ideas are general purpose enough that I think they can be presented to people who are outside of the world of classical training, and without all of the baggage that comes from also having to learn 800 years of music to be able to cite relevant examples. It’s not actually necessary to study Mozart string quartets to figure out how good melodic writing works; you can find it in Daft Punk tracks.

http://cdm.link/2015/04/non-oblique-str ... ing-music/

[Michael L]

And to further support the "less is more" approach, here's music theory in one blog post (or two if you follow his link):
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... highlight=

Also, Russo's #2 Rule: Sing what you compose, while you are composing it.

[jancivil]

sing everything, make a connection of your body vibrating, your voice vibrating as a primary vehicle to manifest your head's music

My friend was already a composer by the time he reached SF Conservatory. It's after he consistently called me composer I felt like I could say that about my efforts. It didn't occur to me to require being taught to compose. I had the instinct at 14 years of age but I chose to learn an instrument, and one that I could obtain harmony and melody at the same time on (classical guitar). I did not have a piano in the home at any time, though.

I knew one real composer at Cinci who def didn't need school to teach him to compose. He's the only composer I hung out with there at all, he was rather a prodigy and became noted and one of the rarest of people, that makes a living as a pure artist. He was raised to be that, which means recognized as that quite young.

If one is not composing kind of just by their nature, there isn't anything that's going to fill that in for you in a book or a school. I took 'Music Theory' first year and second year at Central Piedmont Community College concurrently, having talked the second year teacher to allow me to without the prerequisite. I found my part-writing results very encouraging and I started writing a bit. I'd been a musician and somewhat solid for a while, I had 10 years on the guitar by the time I started writing more than little idiomatic things for guitar.

[deastman]

Jancivil- it always perplexes me that someone with your technical skill and knowledge of theory would say that composition can't be taught.

I interpret the OP as saying that they've written some basic I IV V progressions, but don't know how to extrapolate to something slightly more sophisticated.

Surely there must be books which provide instruction in thematic development, chord substitutions, key changes, the circle of fifths, basic voice leading, and so on and so forth while not being written for college level music majors? What about an analysis of the music of The Beatles? Learn by example?

If you want to say that talent can't be taught, fine. A person can't learn from a book to make GOOD music, fine. But it seems a little dismissive and condescending to suggest that one can't learn about common chord progressions, song structure, and how to embellish the basic concepts. I'm sure there must be books like that , and if there aren't... well, there's a perfect hole in the market for someone to fill.

[StudioDave]

Jancivil- it always perplexes me that someone with your technical skill and knowledge of theory would say that composition can't be taught.

Bartok would not teach for exactly Jan's reason - he simply thought it couldn't be taught, that you were either a composer from birth or forget about it. Which, yes, is a pretty radical point of view and one probably not easily understood.

Stravinsky was another one. As far as I know he had no direct students at all. Perhaps he simply preferred not to teach, though he was certainly a model for some of Nadia Boulanger's instruction.

OTOH Schoenberg, Sessions, and Hindemith felt that the elements of the craft could be taught, and I think this is Jan's point. You can learn the grammar, syntactical rules, and all the other structural elements of a language, but that will not provide the particular gift to make you a great poet. That is a special condition dependent on the grace of whatever god or gods you care to believe in. Like the flamenco guitarists, we practice the craft severely in order to acquire the skill needed for the expressing whatever is required when the duende (the spirit of the thing) falls upon us.

An aside: If you want to succeed at being a composer or songwriter, then consider your craft in exactly the same way you would consider the acquisition of technical skill on an instrument, i.e. you have to practice the art, you need to write something every day, regardless of quality or length, just get it done. Your counterpoint, harmony, and formal analysis studies are your equivalents of the endless rounds of scales and arpeggios practiced by serious instrumentalists. Yes, modern software removes the effort from a lot of this study, but you must still put in hard work and dedication to master the necessary skills.

So you want to be a better songwriter ? Write a song every day for a year. Find your topics in the daily news or from wherever. Read a stranger's obituary then write a song derived from their life. Don't make the mistake of self-absorption. Write as complicated a song as possible one day, then rewrite it in the simplest way imaginable on the next day.

Study within and beyond your musical comfort zone. Acquire a deep musical culture. That may take some time.

Best regards,

dp

[mcbpete]

It's a hideous looking front cover but I found this book to be really helpful: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Theory-Compute ... 598635034/ ( Music Theory for Computer Musicians by Michael Hewitt )

As well as being a really good introduction, even those with some music theory should get some stuff from it (I certainly did!) ...