J. Anthony Allen explains tension and release as the core principle of composition, showing how rhythm, harmony, dynamics, and other tools create unease and resolution. A G pedal note on the off-beat demonstrates how a single sound generates dissonance. The course culminates in a film-music case study where composers balance their ideas with a director's vision.
Okay, next, let's talk about the topic of this course, which is tension and release. Now, this is. This is what I came up with for just kind of a broad way to put all the topics that we're going to talk about in this class together. So that doesn't mean that everything we talk about in this course is going to be about making tension. Tension implies a certain kind of music, right? That's not exactly true. Tension in release is one of the most fundamental compositional techniques we have. So what that means is we want to make something that gives a feeling of absence. What that really has to do is with. Is the kind of polarity of music or in a certain kind of music. But you get the point. It's this note that just kind of goes in there and it changes the whole feel of. Can get sinister depending on what note you use. We use the dominant, so it kind of has an uncomfortableness to it. Now I've got that G just pulsing on the offbeat. I'm gonna put that through this whole bloody thing. Don't worry, I won't make you listen to this whole long, long thing again. I just want to get the sense of it. Okay? So now, effectively, what I have is a pedal tone here. The pedal tone is not sustaining forever because I don't have that much sustain in this. Hey, everyone, welcome to my composition sequence. Music composition sequence part 2. Focusing on tension and release. So let's just dive right in and let me tell you why you care about tension and release. First of all, this is something that is fundamental to all writing of music. It's something we think about all the time. So what I've done in this class is I've taken a whole bunch of composition techniques that I use every day. And then I kind of thought about how can I bundle these all together? What's the common thread here? And it was creating a sense of tension and release. There's a whole bunch of different ways to look at that and to achieve it. So in this class, we're going to be talking about using rhythm to create a sense of tension release. Of course, using harmony to create a sense of tension release, but also using meter, using dynamics, using form to create this sense of tension release. And we're going to wrap it up at the end of this class by applying those concepts to some film music. And we're going to look at some projects where a composer had to work with a director who had their own sense of tension and release and how the composer achieved it. So it's a really fun class I'm really proud of it I think I I use the umbrella of tension release to introduce a whole bunch of composition techniques, styles, processes and just ways that I do things I'm going to show you a bunch of different projects in this class a bunch of different pieces of music some of them mine some of them other people's and for the ones that are mine anyway I'll talk about how I made them and what was going through my head and why I made some of those decisions all kind of based around the idea creating a sense of tension and and then resolving that sense of tension with a release so I hope you decide to join us in this class It's a ton of fun we can do a lot of really cool things and it's going to help you be a better composer if you're interested in writing music this is how you do it so please jump in and we will see you in the first lecture. It.
