digital_jungle/_notes/Music composition.md

title
Music Composition

Status: 🌱

Table of contents

• Motives and Phrases
• Harmonic Function
• Sentence and Period
• Harmonic Rhythm and Sequence
• Secondary Dominants

Motives and Phrases

Motives

• "smallest musical idea"
• usually 2-7 notes¹
• motive is a seed/DNA of things to come
• motives are developed

2 parts of a good motive:

1. distinct interval/shape²
2. distinct rhythm

Phrases

• "complete expression of that idea³"
• consists of motives
• standard phrase is 2 bars long

3 parts of a good phrase:

1. motive - no more than 3 motives
2. peak - the most something; can be lowest/highest, loudest, most disonant, etc⁴
3. punctuation - as in writing, simplest is rest or hold a note⁵. Important to give listener a pause

Harmonic Function

Each chord in a key has a function.

For major key

Tonic	Subdominant	Dominant
I	ii	V
iii	IV	vii6
vi

C Dm Em F G Am Bdim can change to Cmaj7 Dm7 Em7 Fmaj7 G7 Am7 Bm7(b5)

in minor key Am Bdim C Dm Em F G Am7 Bm7(b5)⁷ Cmaj7 Dm Em7⁸ Fmaj7 G7⁸

Period and sentence forms

Period

• 8 bar phrase
• basic idea⁹ - 2 bars
• antecedent = basic idea + 2bars that end with half cadence¹⁰ - 4 bars
• consequent - basic idea¹¹ + 2 bars that end with authentic cadence - 4 bars
• period = antecedent + consequent. It's bit like question and answer, or saying basic idea, "not sure where to go", repeat basic idea and lead somewhere satisfying.

Period is a very balanced form. ABAC is good representation of it.

Sentence

• also 8 bar form
• more forward directed than period
• 4 first bars -> basic idea x2¹¹
• bars 5&6 -> continuation -> there's "more something"¹²
• bars 7&8 -> any cadence

because of open end it is easy to move on, but more difficult to use repetition to extend beyond 8 bars due to repetitive nature of beginning. AABC is good representation of it

Harmonic Rhythm and Sequence

Harmonic rhythm

how many chords per bar ¹³

Sequence (in melody)

Take a small pattern and shift in N steps, for example

def efg fga¹⁴

Harmonic Sequence

tl;dr the same but for chords

Examples:

• chords going down by 3rds: C Am F Dm
• ii V I that goes forever: Dm7 G7 Cmaj7 Cm7 F7 Bbmaj7 Bbm7 Eb7 Abmaj7...

very useful in continuation of sentence form

Secondary Dominants

tl;dr borrowing V chords from other keys that tonics are present in our key

example:

1. in key of C we have Dm chord
2. in key of D we have A(A7) as dominant chord
3. we can "borrow" that A7 and lead into Dm even in a context of C

Basically, we can create a "pull" into any chord¹⁵ and add some extra color (C# in A in example above)

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1. rule of thumb - can be more, but difficult to pull off. Same with 1 note, very exceptional cases. ↩︎

2. distinct doesn't necessarily mean never heard before - just something that is recognisable in a piece ↩︎

3. idea = motive ↩︎

4. it needs to stand out and it's best to hit it only once ↩︎

5. good idea is to visualise someone singing and needing to take a breath ↩︎

6. very spicy in major, beginner should avoid ↩︎

7. dimished here is more useful in minor, as it can be seen as "spicy subdominant chord to v" ↩︎

8. can be changed to E/E7 and G#dim/G#dim7 to give more pull into tonic ↩︎

9. pretty harmonically stable ↩︎

10. contrasting idea ↩︎

11. can be copypaste, can introduce variation, but familiar melody needs to be repeated ↩︎

12. no matter what more, but more. Bit like with peak. Can be more chords in a bar. Can be idea expressed in 1 bar instead of 2. Can be more notes. ↩︎

13. use similar chord functions to increate chord count ↩︎

14. even if we shift diatonically, not exactly by the same amount, so it fits the scale, if overall shape is the same - it still counts as a sequence ↩︎

15. except vii° ↩︎