Quote:
Originally Posted by Gongchime
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.
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. [...]
Another point they brought up is that its often important to contrast starting and ending points between the sections. ...
You can also contrast melodic rhythms between sections or phrases. Long held notes on the chorus and shorter note values for the verse.
Or contrast phrase lengths within or between sections.
[...] In fact another one of my article reads said that pro musicians had a rhythmic concept behind their melody writing and amateurs didn't and only thought about a string of notes. ****, most music just walks up and down the scale by neighbor notes. That aspect is hardly important most of the time for pop and rock music.
... The other old wives tale was reversing direction after a leap. Once I tried to follow that rule on everything I wrote and it was all crap. Lesson; don't believe everything your told.
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Gongchime, your interest in the complexities of music and music analysis is one I share, and I wish you'd stop by MusicBanter more than once every...six years!
I'll look for you again in 2017.
I've been slowly reading
Daniel J. Levitin's book, "This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession," which was recommended to me by our member LuciferSam. This book and your post make me realize I want to spend even more time learning about music theory. I want to know more about musical composition conventions, "rules," and techniques so that I can use or break them at will and be more aware of musical options I may not have thought about before.
Reading your post makes me consider the range of issues I think about while composing and how I can expand that. I still remember how excited I was when I first learned what "counterpoint" meant; afterwards, I enjoyed using it myself. Creating music is the best and most satisfying game I've ever played, around a million times better than Solitaire. Even from a distance in time and space, it's nice to read the words of someone else who appreciates the game.