How Pros Compose

I once read that Sting sometimes sets the sentences in his morning newspaper to music. This has the added benefit of suggesting possible lyrics once an adequate melody has materialized.

One article was saying that people who have composing careers tend to start with the big picture and work down toward the details. Amateurs do the opposite. Pros are able to conceive of and write several parts simultaneously taking into account how they interrelate.
Amateurs write one bar at a time.

Another point about complexity is instrumentation. Perhaps the reason pop music has only 5 or 6 parts is due to the "not enough instruments=boring, too many instruments=chaos" dichotomy. Pop music has the happy medium.

I was reading a scholarly article about complexity that basically said successfully creative people have personalities that love complexity, so they're able to crank out all this different stuff. However, complexity is not the same as popularity. The Beatles, it mentioned, got less and less popular, the more complex they're music became.

The most popular music, they said, tends to have a moderate amount of complexity, not more or less. I read a related article on music perception/psychology which mentioned that well formed rhythms (what people expect to hear) have 2-6 events per 5 seconds (that must be the parameters for a moderate amount of complexity in that musical dimension). The tempo 100 beats per minute is in the center of the perceptual field (moderate complexity?).

Rhythmic Permutations

I also just had some insight into rhythm permutations. Random permutations are not musically meaningful the same way random note permutations end up sounding meaningless, hence the need for some structure such as inversions and retrogrades provide.

I remembered that, in Africa, master drummers cycle through rhythms. So, if you’ve got the one played all over Africa 2+2+1+2+2+2+1, when you want to play something different but related to this, you can play through one of it’s rhythmic modes. For example starting on the second rhythm event and using that as the beginning aka 2+1+2+2+2+1+2. This is musically meaningful/useful permutations of the rhythm.

Notice also that the first one I gave mirrors the intervals in a major scale M2 M2 m2 M2 M2 M2 m2. Because of this we can say it is the Ionian rhythmic mode. Another interesting thing about this is that the other two most prominant rhythmic modes in Africa are part of the cycle of this one. It shouldn’t perhaps be surprising then that they are in fact the Lydian and Mixolydian modes. I, IV and V. Creepy, I know.

Another more abstract but still musically meaningful permutation is to sort notes in ascending and/or descending order of length or perhaps rhythmic cells sorted in ascending order of probability, just like in my chart on my http://www.myspace.com/gongchime page in the Music Comps folder under pics.

I was looking at the chart in the other post about Probability and was thinking about how that data is similar to a zip file and that every melody used to create it is still stored in the data and we just need to unpack it. That lead me to think about a phenomenon called Automorphs. Maybe you’ve heard of them.

You can take any kind of series melodic or rhythmic and then just continue to expand or contract it so, for example, if you move up an interval of a m2 then the next time you can move up the interval of a M2 and after that a m3 etc...

Rhythmically, it might go a sixteenth followed by an eighth followed by a sixteenth morphed using rhythmic augmentation into an eighth followed by a quarter followed by an eighth and morphed again the same way into a quarter note followed by a half note followed by a quarter. Then played back to back. You can also alternate such as moving UP a m2 DOWN a M2 UP a m3 etc...

I wanted to mention that not every culture thinks about things the same way we do and what they’re thinking about can be very surprising to us. Specifically I’m thinking about the first comment in the article made about Mozart that said he used just a short list of melodic patterns that he composed from. I suspect this may have come from his father Leopold encountered somehow by way of Middle Eastern musicians.

Before explaining, it should probably be pointed out that when Europe was wallowing in the dark ages, all of the mathemtical and scientific advancements were coming out of the Middle East of those regions at that time.

When improvising, many musicians coming from Middle Eastern countries don’t just go up and down the scale or hop around the way we might. They have been taught by a teacher to join fairly short melodic patterns together. There are three kinds for ease of memorization; upper tetra-chord, lower-tetrachord and one’s that bridge the tetrachods.

You can start on any pattern that you learned at any position, it doesn’t have to be the first pitch and you can end on any position, then if you want to continue a melodic line you have to either superimpose the last note you played onto another of the basic patterns at the place where it has that pitch or to an adjacent pitch aka conjunct or disjunct respectively. This seems to be similar to what Mozart had done.

Their teacher’s teacher’s teacher going back thousands of years had already worked out the most common solutions and taught improv using this method. And this has become the basis for much of the Middle Eastern tradition. Using my handy dandy chart recently acquired, I’ve made a list of the common solutions through the pitch series that are the most effective in the Western tradition.