J. Anthony AllenComposer, Producer, Music Educator, Entrepreneur

Music Composition and Film Scoring: More On Process

Name: Music Composition and Film Scoring: More On Process
Uploaded: 2018-08-14T01:25:32+00:00
Duration: 1 min 58 s
Channel: J. Anthony Allen
Description: In this lecture excerpt, the instructor emphasizes the importance of diverse, unconventional sources for musical ideas and provides encouragement to…

14 Aug 2018 · 2 min

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1:58

In this lecture excerpt, the instructor emphasizes the importance of diverse, unconventional sources for musical ideas and provides encouragement to explore “weird” methods. He surveys historical practices such as assigning notes to pool‑ball pockets, using dice games, applying mathematical theorems, and mapping star charts—citing John Cage as a notable example. The talk frames these practices as a way to break through the hardest part of composing: the initial “hump” of figuring out where to start. The class has already supplied a first set of tools to generate ideas, and the instructor promises additional theoretical tools that will help students sustain and develop their pieces once the initial spark is ignited.

Chapters

So throughout this class, we've looked at ways of generating ideas and ways of getting started. When you're writing a piece of music, keep in mind there are a million other ideas and ideas come from everywhere, right? So don't be afraid to explore and don't be afraid to get kind of weird. You'll see once you get really into composition. If you look at some of the ways that composers throughout history have generated ideas, you would be pretty blown away by some of the stuff people have come up with. Everything from using a pool table and assigning notes to the balls in the pockets, to dice games. Dice games were really popular for a while. To math theorems. Those are still popular in some ways. To any kind of randomized data. Star charts using stars, and just like laying staff paper over a map of the stars in any given area at any given night and then just drawing note heads wherever there's a star. That was something that at least one person did for quite a while, and that person was John Cage. You'd be surprised. So let ideas come from anywhere when you're working on music. Hopefully in this class, I've given you kind of the first round of tools to be able to come up with some ideas to get you over that initial hump, which is frankly the hardest part about writing music. Get you over that hump of where do I start and what do I do? You know, what am I doing here? And once you're over that, you now have some theory tools that'll get you up and running, it'll get you off the ground and hopefully continuing on with your piece.