Idiot's Guides - Music Theory

by Michael Miller

  The Great American Songbook. This consists of sophisticated pop songs written by professional songwriters between the years of 1900 and 1950, often for Broadway shows. These so-called Tin Pan Alley songwriters include giants like Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and George and Ira Gershwin.

  Rock. Rock and roll arrived in the mid-1950s, sanding off the rough edges of that era’s black music to make it more palatable to white teenaged audiences. This new musical stew included elements of traditional country, honky-tonk, electric blues, jump blues, and R&B, all stirred together with a rolling straight eighth-note beat. From those initial country and R&B flavorings, rock evolved into myriad subgenres throughout the 1960s and beyond. There was the surf music of The Beach Boys, followed by the British Invasion of The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, followed by hippie-dippy psychedelic rock and Dylan-inspired folk rock, followed by heavy metal and disco and punk rock and New Wave and progressive rock and grunge and any number of related and unrelated variations.

  Rhythm and blues (R&B). This is contemporary black music that evolved from the blues and jazz music of the 1940s. In its original form and in later incarnations as soul, funk, and contemporary R&B, this music brought black culture to white audiences across America.

  Rap and hip hop. This music consists of spoken lyrics (that’s the “rap”) over a steady beat. Some rap songs incorporate snippets of melody, often sampled from other songs. That said, rap music is more about the beat and the words than anything else; there’s still a basic verse-chorus form, but the focus is on the lyrics, not on the music.

  NOTE

  Rock music arguably has been the most dominant type of popular music from the 1950s to today. The more generic term “pop music” refers to any type of popular music, typically using the same format but with a lighter beat and smoother instrumentation. For example, one might argue Katy Perry is more pop than rock, whereas Green Day is definitely more rock than pop. (Don’t even ask about Barry Manilow and Pat Boone ….)

  Exercises

  Instead of traditional questions and answers, the exercises for this chapter are listening exercises. Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to seek out and listen to recordings that represent the various types of music you’ve just read about. Listen to the pieces with an ear toward what makes each type of music unique—think about the form, the level of complexity, the type of instrumentation, and so forth. Write down your impressions, if you like, and find someone equally interested to discuss them with. (Or just consider yourself more informed for doing the listening.) To get you started, I’ve created Spotify and YouTube playlists that include recordings that represent the music discussed in this chapter. You can link to these playlists from this book’s web page, located at idiotsguides.com/musictheory.

  The Least You Need to Know

  What we call “classical” music includes music from multiple musical eras, including the Medieval, Baroque, Renaissance, Classical, Romantic, and Twentieth Century eras.

  There are several important types of classical compositions, including Mass, motet, concerto, sonata, symphony, and opera.

  Blues and jazz music both derive from African American work songs and incorporate the blues scale and blues progression.

  Professional songwriters such as Irving Berlin and George Gershwin contributed sophisticated music and lyrics to the Great American Songbook of the early twentieth century.

  The world of popular music includes a variety of styles, including folk, country, rock, R&B, and rap.

  CHAPTER

  19

  Composing Your Own Music

  In This Chapter

  Discovering the tools you need to compose a piece of music

  Learning how to compose using chord progressions

  Finding out how to create strong melodies

  Whether you’re writing a rock, country, or folk song, or composing a longer, more serious work (not that pop music isn’t serious business), you work with the same elements. All musical compositions must include a melody and a series of chords. Now, you can write the melody first and then add chords, write the chords first and then add a melody, or write both melody and chords at the same time, but you need both of those elements.

  How you put those melodies and chords together determines your final composition. And that’s what this chapter is all about: composing music.

  How to Become a Composer

  What is composition? In musical terms, composition is the art of creating a piece of music. That piece of music can be as short as an advertising jingle or as long as an opera. It can be instrumental or vocal; it can be “serious” or commercial, popular or avant garde, classical or contemporary. It can be a three-chord song for a rock or country band or a complex work for a full orchestra and chorus. In short, a musical composition can be anything you can hum or sing or play. There are no boundaries as to what you can create.

  That said, you can’t just jot down a bunch of random notes and call it a composition. (Well, you could, but nobody would want to listen to it.) A good composition has form and meaning; it tells a story, or invokes a mood, or takes you from one place to another. The best compositions create their own self-contained realities, where individual components relate to and with each other within the whole. There is a reason for each phrase and individual note, all of which combine to create a whole that is more than the sum of the parts.

  I like to think of the process of writing a composition as being similar to telling a story. As you can tell many different types of stories, you can create many different types of compositions. Some stories relate a specific set of facts; others convey a general mood; still others exist merely to entertain. A good story takes you from point A to point B in a relatively efficient fashion, while containing enough extraneous elements to make the journey entertaining; there are often characters or places or other elements that provide both color and context. And, when the story is over, there’s typically a point to the whole thing, something to remember and reflect upon.

  NOTE

  Songwriting is a particular type of composition with both music and lyrics. For the purposes of this book, we’ll focus strictly on musical composition, which is kind of like songwriting without the words.

  Different Approaches to Composition

  As you learn how to write your own music, you’ll discover that there are several different ways to approach a composition. They all start with a blank sheet of staff paper (or virtual page in your notation software), but require you to look at your pending composition in different ways.

  There is no one “correct” way to begin a composition. Some composers take one approach, some another, some work both ways—often by creating the chords and melody simultaneously. Which method you choose is a personal decision. And you’re not limited to just one approach; you can use different approaches for different pieces. Whichever way you start, the goal should be the same—to create an artistically viable piece of music. How you create each piece of music is a personal choice.

  If you consider that a piece of music is typically constructed from a combination of chords and melodies (and, in the case of songwriting, lyrics), then you have a simple choice in front of you. You can start by creating a chord progression and fitting a melody to your chords, or you can start by creating a melody and then fitting chords to that melody. Consider:

  Chords first: Also called harmonic composition, you start by creating a chord progression and then fit a melody to those chords. This approach is popular among many composers, especially those working within the framework of the popular song. That’s because after you’ve created a chord progression, you essentially have a harmonic road map for the entire composition that helps to guide the melodies you create. Unfortunately, some composers tend to use a chord progression as a crutch, and often create melodies that simply outline the chords rather than standing on their own.

  Melody first: Also called melodic composition, you start by creating a melody and then fit the appropriate
chords to that melody. When you craft a melody on its own, it isn’t subject to the harmonic constraints of an arbitrary chord progression; it’s allowed to flow wherever it needs to. This approach is very respectful of the primacy of melody, with all other aspects of the composition taking a subsidiary role. If you go this route, you have to employ your knowledge of harmony to harmonize the melody—that is, to fit a chord progression to the melody.

  Chords and melody together: If you can approach composition from either a chords-first or melody-first approach, why not combine both approaches and compose everything at once? That’s the nature of holistic composition, where you progress measure-by-measure, creating the melodies and harmonies simultaneously. Since melodies and chords are intrinsically related, it makes sense to write them together—if you can. (This approach requires a thorough understanding of music theory, a very good ear, and a good feel for where you want your composition to go—and thus may not be the best way to go for beginners.)

  NOTE

  Some composers prefer a layering approach, where you start by creating one vocal or instrumental part, and then you layer additional parts on top of that. The composition builds piece by piece, until you’ve built a layered whole. Layering is used to good effect with certain contemporary musical forms; it’s also the approach used in loop-based music you create on your computer, where you build a composition by layering different musical loops on top of each other.

  Learning How to Write Your Own Music

  To be a successful composer, you need a certain set of skills. In particular, you need to be able to manipulate the building blocks of any composition—the notes and rhythms and chords that combine to create a piece of music. To this end, you must have a thorough grounding in music theory, as well as a good ear. It also helps to have some innate sense of melody and harmony, although this can be developed with proper training.

  A successful composer must also have the ability to arrange and orchestrate the music he writes. Composition is seldom as simple as a melody and accompanying chords; most full-blown compositions are ultimately orchestrated for a range of instruments, whether that’s a four-piece rock band or full symphonic orchestra. So you need to know at least a little bit about a lot of different instruments—not necessarily how to play each one, but rather how they sound and how they’re written. (Learn more about arranging and orchestration in Chapter 20.)

  Assuming you have (or learn) these basic skills, learning how to compose involves fitting the various building blocks together to express your musical vision. It’s kind of like learning how to write prose or poetry; once you know the building blocks of written language, you then have to learn how to use those building blocks to tell your stories in print.

  There’s also the issue of creativity. Although you can, over time, learn the necessary compositional tools and techniques, you need to supply your own creativity and inspiration. Creating a melody really is more than just arranging notes in a certain order; the best melodies come from somewhere inside of you, and reflect your personality and experiences. Music is, after all, a creative endeavor—and composing music requires all the creativity you can muster.

  Composing with Chords

  Let’s start with the approach that most beginning musicians and many songwriters employ—harmonic composition. That means coming up with a catchy chord progression and then fitting a melody to it.

  When you’re working with harmonic composition, you can work with any number and type of chords. You don’t have to limit yourself to the natural chords within a scale or key (the diatonic chords) or with simple three-note triads, especially when you’re working in more contemporary forms. You can explore all manner of chromatic chords and extended chords and the like, even chords that don’t really look or sound like traditional chords—two-note harmonies, or note clusters with no discernable tonal center. In other words, the entire harmonic spectrum is available for your use.

  That said, when you’re first starting out, it’s a good idea to work within some sort of structure, to help guide your creativity. Once you’ve learned how to compose within a traditional harmonic structure, you can begin to explore nontraditional harmonies; you use the structure to help hone your craft.

  Using Chord Leading

  One easy way to come up with a pleasant-sounding chord progression is to use chord leading. As you learned in Chapter 10, chord leading is the concept that certain chords naturally lead to other chords. For example, the V or dominant chord leads naturally back to I, the tonic. The IV, or subtonic, can lead naturally to the I, iii, V, or vii° chords. And so forth. (You learned about which chords lead to which in Chapter 10.)

  The most common way to utilize chord leading is simply to use the chord-leading rules to move from one chord to the next. Let’s say you start with a I chord, which can lead to any other chord. You choose the iii chord as the next chord, which then leads you to (among others) the IV chord. The IV chord leads you up to the V chord, and then back to I. And there’s your chord progression:

  I iii IV V I

  In the key of C, that works out to:

  C / / / Em / / / F / / / G / / / C / / /

  And you can bend those chord-leading rules a bit too, as shown in this progression used in thousands of hit songs from “Let It Be” to “Don’t Stop Believin’” to “Hey, Soul Sister.” Start with the I, of course, but then jump up to the V. Now, the V should lead back to the I, but it can also lead in other directions, such as up one step to the vi chord. Move from the vi to the IV, then from there back home to the I. This is what you get:

  I V vi IV I

  Here’s how that sounds, in the key of C:

  C / / / G / / / Am / / / F / / / C / / /

  NOTE

  Even easier, you can base your composition on one of the common chord progressions detailed in Chapter 10. Nothing wrong with a simple I-IV-V or ii-V-I progression for your tune!

  Establishing a Harmonic Rhythm

  Working with chord-based composition brings up an interesting question: just how often should you change chords? The pace of a chord progression, or where the chords are placed within a phrase, is called harmonic rhythm. In other words, the harmonic rhythm dictates how often you change chords—and when.

  Obviously, the number of beats or measures allotted to each chord isn’t set in stone. For example, you could write the I-IV-V progression with a single measure for each chord. Or you could write two measures of I and a measure each of IV and V. Or you could write three measures of I, then two beats each of IV and V in a fourth measure. Or you could write 16 measures of I, 16 measures of IV, and another 16 measures of V. It all depends on the nature of your composition and helps provide an almost infinite variety of possible chord combinations.

  There are no rules for harmonic rhythm. You can extend a chord over any number of measures, or change chords frequently within a single measure. You can set your chord changes on the first beat of each measure or on any subsidiary beat. You can even change chords on the upbeat, if you want.

  It’s common to change chords more often at slower tempos than at faster ones. It’s simply easier to fit two or four chords into one slower-moving measure than it is within a faster-paced tune. A fast-paced country song, for example, might have chord changes every two or four measures. A slower-tempo ballad, on the other hand, might change chords every two beats within a single measure. There’s more space for each chord when the tempo is slower.

  The harmonic rhythm is one factor that establishes the sound and feel of a particular composition. A rapid harmonic rhythm will dictate, more often than not, particular types of melodies—typically faster-moving melodies. A slower harmonic rhythm will let your piece breathe a little more. And varying the harmonic rhythm will provide contrast within your piece. Use harmonic rhythm to establish the mood and pace of your compositions.

  TIP

  Although there are many notable exceptions, I find that a somewhat faster harmonic rhythm helps to create more interesting melod
ies. Whenever there’s a chord change, there is impetus to make the melody move accordingly—and the more movement there is in a melody, the more interesting it is.

  Fitting Melodies to Your Chords

  When you employ a chord-based compositional approach, the chord progression you create becomes a framework on which you later construct a melody. But just how do you fit a melody to your chords? We discussed some of this back in Chapter 10, but let’s go into more detail here.

  A common approach is to base your melody on the notes of the chords. That is, you use the chord tones to define the main notes of your melody. For example, if you’re holding a D minor for a few measures, you would work with the notes D, F, and A for your melody. You can then add passing and approach notes to connect these main chord tones.

  A melody based on key chord tones.

  You can also create a melody that utilizes the common notes in adjacent chords. For example, if you’re using the popular C-G-Am-F progression, know that the first two chords have the note G in common, and the last two have the notes A and C in common. (The G and Am chords don’t have any notes in common, sorry.) So you can base the melody in the first two bars around the note G, and in the last two bars around either A or C.

  A melody based on common tones in the underlying chords.

  Another approach is to use notes that emphasize the key quality of the underlying chords. For example, the dominant (V) chord gets its tension from the root, so emphasize that. Similarly, when shifting between major and minor chords, emphasize the changes by basing the melody on the thirds of each chord.