Tips for Young Composers

CLASSICAL MUSIC

Monteverdi's L'Orfeo - Favola in Musica,

is one of the first operas ever - it's still

fresh today, as it was when it was first penned in the 17th century.

First of all, it's played by the brass.

Then it's played by the strings.

And then he adds the strings and the brass together for a third time.

I'm able to show the students, you know,

look how cleverly this is constructed,

you can use similar techniques to make your own melodies.

So I've called the project Salford doubles.

A double is when you take a piece of music and make a new version of it

using similar materials - it's like a variation.

This is a really good piece to take as a starting point

because the ideas are simple, but the way he puts them together

make them sophisticated, so what we're going to do,

we're going to make our own versions.

When I heard about the opportunity to come here

and do this project, I was really, really enthusiastic.

I play the piano and generally I haven't composed much before.

With the first session, Barry was talking to us about

the capabilities of instruments and what they are good at.

The students are actually writing for real live musicians -

seven members of the BBC Philharmonic - and it's important

that they are thinking in terms of what these players can do.

We can do long.

Staccato.

Um, pizzicato, plucking the string.

It's interesting writing for instruments

you don't really know how to play, that first session was quite useful.

You could hear what they sound like, what they're good at, not so good at.

When you are given a piece like Monteverdi to already work with,

you don't have to do a lot of the initial thinking yourself

which can sometimes be really hard.

Because I've already got a melody written for me,

it can give me a lot of scope on what I can do with it.

How are you making these decisions about where the notes go?

All of my melody is the Monteverdi melody, which is in the booklets

and then I thought, what happens if I make that a flat

and how can I change the chord underneath?

Go back and look at what you've done already.

Are there any really good ideas in there that I could actually make a feature of?

What Barry's made me realise is I've got lots

and lots of material that I can work with,

but I can stretch that out massively,

especially this first rhythm here.

Originally, that was just there for one bar, but due to the advice

Barry's given me, I thought I would expand on this idea.

So, here it is developing a bit and it just sort of continues.

I didn't have a lot of faith in what I'd written,

because it's so different from what I'm sort of comfortable with composing,

but after today's sessions, I can see it going somewhere.

So with the Monteverdi, one really interesting thing is

the fact that it is all anchored to a pedal.

DEEP NOTE And there it goes.

So a thing you can play with is

that notion of a pedal and moving different chords against it.

So the different chords create tension against the pedal.

I play trumpet but in this ensemble,

there's lots of other instruments - stringed instruments, especially -

and writing for them is really interesting because there's lots of techniques

like double stopping, which you just can't do on a trumpet.

It's stopping two notes and stopping means actually playing,

so obviously I could play the A and the E string together

and double stop it, I could play the A and the D string together.

What I couldn't do is play the E string

and the G string together, because there's two strings in the middle.

I've used double stopping in my piece.

That's where two notes are played at the same time.

The way I'd written it before couldn't be played,

so Barry's helped show me how I can write it to be played properly.

Ben's piece is manipulating the material by adding accidentals

and changing a B to a B flat.

So it just changes the inflection

and what's happened is it sounds quite cartoonish and jokey

and that actually fits Ben, because he has a good sense of humour.

One of these new ideas Barry made us aware of

was where you have, for example, two instruments starting

on the same pitch and one would go upwards and one would go down.

I like the way that you are using mirroring here.

So here's the Monteverdi, da-da da-da,

and here it is in a mirror,

so we can feel the presence of Monteverdi,

but it's very much a la Justin.

Justin has literally turned Monteverdi on his head.

First of all, we get the tune the right way up.

But then he turns it upside down.

So we hear the rhythm of the Monteverdi,

but it's not doing what the Monteverdi originally did, so, again,

there's a sense of humour there and a quirkiness and it really works.

What I got from this process is that, in a way,

less is more - you don't need to keep introducing ideas,

you can just develop them and change them and that's interesting enough.

With this experience, I feel a lot more comfortable

writing for instruments that I don't know how to play.

I've learnt a lot more about general composing

and I know how to come up with material out of thin air.

PIANO

The Bach C Major Prelude is an absolute gem of a piece.

It's very simple in musical terms, it just takes one shape

and it repeats it at different levels over the keyboard.

It's a really intricate piece of composition

and there are so many things that we can learn from it -

the way he moves his chords, the directions he takes his harmony in.

A lesser composer might have said, "I'll just move that up one note."

Not so interesting, but what Bach does...

PLAYS PIANO

He keeps this note still and he goes...

So he had a much more rich chord.

So for the students,

I want them to find their own chord shapes.

For example, they might start with something like...

..and then just say, "Where can I take this?"

Bach used a lot of repetition with his melodies.

I took a melody from Bach's piece and I've repeated it here,

and I've done the same pattern but changed the notes

and gone up some notes here, and it just repeats.

The students have to take that idea of moving chords around,

but they've now got to think, "How do I now reimagine that

"with a string quartet, a clarinet, a horn or a percussionist?"

This time, over the top, I've added harmonies around the piano.

Bach's piece was written by the piano, so I had to take the idea

that he was using two main bars - his right and his left hand -

and so he used the violin - 1 - as his right hand

and violin 2 as his left hand.

With the clarinet, the horn and the cello, I just added them

in the background to help give the piece some colour.

So once they've started sharing the chord patterns

with different instruments,

they're starting to build up textures within the ensemble.

It's great to have a full sound some of the time, but it's also

nice to hear the individual instruments.

I've written a very simple piece of music

which shows how texture can be built up.

We're going to come in one instrument at a time, just build up line by line,

just so you can hear how textures build.

So we've got a first violin.

We can add a second violin.

Add a viola.

Add a cello.

And a clarinet.

Thank you very much, so we added just a layer at a time there, yeah?

So the texture built up, rather a nice effect.

Working with Barry's encouraged me to add texture to my piece,

by spreading my instruments out across the piece,

sometimes only having the violin playing,

sometimes only having the cello playing,

or the clarinet, or the horn.

Once you've got a little melodic idea,

you can give it to one instrument,

but if you're thinking in terms of colours

of the instruments, why not share that melody?

Now, you've done something lovely here -

you've shared a melody between the clarinet and the horn in bar 4.

BARRY PLAYS MELODY

Yeah, I've done it three times. I've done it there,

there and I do it on the next page, as well.

Charlie does this very successfully. He starts off on one instrument with

a couple of notes and then he passes it to another instrument,

so we hear the melody

but we also hear the colour of two different instruments.

Clarinet.

Horn.

Did you notice? It was like a tennis match, wasn't it?

Which side are we at now?

He is really playing with colour. Excellent, well done.

So you've generated new material, you've started to manipulate it.

Do a bit more experimenting and then start to think,

"What's the shape of the piece?"

So I'm going to call this idea "A",

and this idea "B", so we can make a simple structure.

Starts with A, and then I put my section next to it which is B,

and just to make it a satisfying shape, I'm going to come back home

to A. Nice simple structure and we call it ternary.

My piece ended here, but Barry told me to add sections into it,

so I've added a section B from here to here.

So that's my section B and then I've put my section A,

which was the first bit, back at the end, but I made a few little tweaks.

Charlie's worked with a sequence of chords,

with different textures, different sections of the piece,

he's cleverly structured it, coming back to ideas

we've heard before, and it makes for a very successful piece.

Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave was chosen

because it paints a picture of the different moods of the sea.

So I want the students to explore the same idea of how they combine

the instruments to get across the different moods of the sea.

So we've chosen this six-note fragment

from the beginning of Fingal's Cave,

da-da-da-da dum dum, da-da-da-da dum dum,

which then Mendelssohn repeats at various pitches,

and it runs all the way through.

The students are going to use this as the basis of their compositions.

I am a cellist, so I don't play wind instruments

and I don't play any percussion instruments,

so I didn't understand what they could do with their instruments.

The students are writing for a seven-piece ensemble -

a string quartet, a clarinet, a French horn and a percussionist -

so before they can begin to do that, they need to know,

what are the possibilities of the instruments?

What can they ask them to do?

The horn is particularly good if you want to have

something quite loud and sharp and brash.

LOUD NOTE

And we've also got the thing called a mute, which, like your TV remote,

just makes it a little bit quieter.

MUTED NOTES

Fingal's cave is on the Isle of Staffa,

where there are those hexagonal rocks,

the same sort that we find on the Giant's Causeway,

and I think it's not insignificant that "da-da da-da da-da" has got six notes.

He moves it around.

PLAYS MELODY

He moves it around.

He could just carry on moving it.

I've used six notes mainly in my piece

and that comes through in the vibraphone.

I had these six notes originally. Then I added three more notes

and I did the same notes on the vibraphone

to the string quartet as well.

You're writing a piece about a storm,

so you've got to think of the drama of that.

You've got to think of the build,

the eye of the storm and the shape of the piece.

Silence is a brilliant thing. So are gaps.

If you've got material that's really, "Chiro, chiro, chiro, chiro",

make a new version that's got gaps in.

Chiro.

Chiro, chiro, chiro.

Same thing, but totally different effect.

Before Mendelssohn went to the Hebrides, he stayed at a monastery,

so I've tried to recreate a choral section at the start of my piece.

Instead of having a soprano, alto, tenor and bass,

I've replaced them with violin 1, 2, viola and violincello

and the melody is played by the clarinet and the horn.

When I started my composition,

I wrote lots and lots of different lines for percussion instruments,

but it's only one man playing it,

so he can't play the vibraphone, the tom toms and the bongos

and the wood blocks and the wind chimes all at the same time.

Let's have the bongos on those lines.

The three tom toms...

The key thing to think about when you're writing for percussion

is play air percussion.

Imagine, here is your vibraphone, here are my wood blocks,

here are my bongos, my tom toms, here's my cymbal.

And as you're writing the music, think yourself round,

can I actually reach those notes, can I get to them?

It actually makes it much easier if everything is on the same stave.

Barry gave me lots of advice

about what it's like for the musicians to play the piece.

See the difference between these two sections here.

As you can see, this one is all together as one thing,

which is just needlessly confusing for the musician,

it's very difficult to count and that's what the split up tells you -

one beat there and one beat there.

I called my piece The Tempest,

so there's lots of ups and downs in the piece.

Like it just goes from mezze forte -

really, really loud - to pianissimo - very quiet - suddenly.

I use a lot of bass in the cello and a lot of eerie kind of sounds.

Like I used a bow on the vibraphone

to create a kind of eerie uncertainty at the start

and at the end of the piece.

It was lovely to hear it come together.

Of all the pieces, Uyiosa's piece is the one that closely answers

the brief, which was to incorporate elements of the Mendelssohn,

the rhythm, the shape of his melody - da-da da-da-dee dum -

and she's put her own slant on it,

so it's a personal response to the Mendelssohn.

This whole process has changed the way I go about writing composition.

Learning more about different instruments

so I can use a wider range of instruments in my future compositions,

and just be more experimental with my composition, as well,

not be afraid to go outside the box, push the boundaries a bit.

At a time when novelists were writing Frankenstein and Dracula,

and painters were making really gory pictures,

it's no surprise that composers were also writing pieces about death.

So this led to Saint-Saens writing his Danse Macabre.

It's a dance of death. It's one of the first tone poems,

it actually paints a picture in sound.

So what I'm asking the students to do is to think,

"What's Saint-Saens done to make his piece so interesting?"

Well, it's about fantastic ways of using the instruments,

so they're going to be writing for musicians from the BBC Philharmonic

and trying to find interesting ways to write for them.

Saint-Saens did some fantastic sound effects in it.

The xylophone pretends it's a skeleton dancing.

The first session here at Media City just taught me what you can achieve

on different instruments and the different techniques you can do.

Could I ask for sul ponticello tremolando. Any note, please?

What we're looking at are the orchestral colours

that Saint-Saens uses.

He has collenia using the wood of the bow

so it sounds like skeletons' bones.

Instant atmosphere. Thank you very much.

Colour in music is the timbre, the tone colour of the instrument,

so I could play you a note on a violin

and then I could ask a clarinet to play the same note.

You would notice the difference in timbre, in tone colour.

Basically, you're an artist and on your palette, you've got violin 1,

violin 2, viola, cello, clarinet, horn and percussion

and you're going...

I've never worked with any of these instruments before,

so to work with it on a computer was even more scary,

but then once you get used to it, it's really easy to work with

and it's good to hear different instruments

and see how you can work with them.

If I had my violin, I'd play you this.

DISCORDANT NOTES

Because one of the feature of the piece he uses is a detuned violin.

The violin is tuned in fifths. G to D, D to A, A to E.

And what Saint-Saens does...

..he tunes that E by tuning the tuning peg down to an E flat.

So now, we get...

If he hadn't, we would get this sound...

..which is a bit too normal, really, for a devils' dance.

Connor uses the idea of dissonance and notes jarring against each other

to create a really grinding effect

which almost sets your teeth on edge,

so he's looked at Saint-Saens and thought, "I'll have some of that."

You've got some ideas which are really lovely

and they happen once. And they could happen again - or they could happen

over and over again, because the audience don't get sick of ideas.

What Barry has said about using the same idea over and over again,

rewrite it in different ways,

so it creates different effects on different people.

Like the vibes here,

that's what happens at the start of Danse Macabre,

them four bars, and then I've just added the violins

and the clarinet in B flat

and it just creates more spookiness in the piece.

The Saint-Saens is actually in triple time.

One, two, three. One, two, three.

But Connor's decided that he wants to run in duple and quadruple time.

One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.

It's still a dance, but it's using quadruple time -

that's four beats in a bar,

rather than triple time - three beats in a bar.

I'm looking forward to the Philharmonic playing my piece

because I can tell the limitations of the musicians.

I can't... Well, really...at speed.

Playing those really quickly is very difficult.

The computer makes a valiant attempt to sound like instruments,

but it can never replace proper instrumentalists,

because even with a single note, they'll bring out

so many nuances in that note which a computer can't do.

The benefits of this process are being able to write

for different instruments and knowing the different instruments,

and the different ranges for the instruments.

Connor's piece is demonic and devilish.

A dance which whips itself up to a frenzy

and then dies away at the end.

Stravinsky said, "A good composer doesn't borrow, he steals",

so we're going to steal bits of other people's compositions

and make new pieces from them.

We've chosen Stravinsky's Petrushka,

one of the ballets Stravinsky wrote for the Ballet Russe in 1911.

But we're using the version that he made in 1947.

He actually went back to something he'd written previously

and altered it -

which gives a good message to the students, you know -

just because you have written it down, don't think it's set in stone.

I'm used to writing for piano but, obviously,

because I'm writing for orchestra, it's been different

because of different extremes of the instruments.

The students are actually writing for an ensemble

from the BBC Philharmonic - strings, clarinet, a horn and percussion -

and they've very much got to think about how to combine them,

and how to find new and different colours from the ensemble.

I wasn't very familiar with writing for vibraphone.

The vibraphone can also sound like a plucked instrument -

played with dead strokes, that's where you keep the head of the beater on the bar.

DAMPENED NOTES

I didn't know that he could pedal the notes.

I can push down so I can make the notes actually resound much more.

DEEP, RESONANT NOTES

The Stravinsky piece had lots of different melodic material

you could choose from and put that into your own piece.

Just from that very opening, we can get our own material to run with,

so, yes - Stravinsky's opening.

So I can take a handful of notes from Stravinsky

and take them to the piano. I'll play them once...

What am I going to do now? Well, let's transpose them,

let's move them somewhere else and see what the effect is.

SAME NOTES ASCENDING

So the students are going to take melodies from the Stravinsky -

I mean, it's just absolutely jam-packed with melodies,

so they've got a lot to choose from - and they're going to take them

and run with them and make their own treatments of the melodies.

So how are we going to score that? So we've got...

'Cameron has written his Stravinsky-inspired piece for piano

'and then he has the task of trying to make

'a similar set of sounds on the ensemble.'

On the piano, that's nice to play,

because that's a nice closed position and it's easy to play, yeah?

Scoring it for the strings, I would put the first violin there,

I'll put my second violin there, and I'll bring that F down,

so we've got that. That's going to make a really nice sound.

Cameron realised for himself that just simply trying to orchestrate

from his piano original wasn't going to work, so he's then gone in

and started thinking about the ensemble

and the effect is much more successful.

Your shape is just directly drawn from the Stravinsky,

but you've softened it considerably.

Cameron has just taken a basic four-note unit from Stravinsky.

Da-da dum-da. He's just taken that four-note unit

and then added his own endings to it,

Stravinksy ends "da-da-da da-da da-da dum-dum..."

HIS HUMMING MORPHS INTO ORCHESTRA

..and Cameron's "da-da-da dee da-dum".

So the Stravinksy is hidden in there,

but he's made it very much his own.

Rhythms from the Stravinsky there again,

so if we hear the Stravinsky before this,

that'll just come out like a happy memory of him.

So this is a melody that Stravinsky used in his piece, Petruschka.

So in violin 1 and the clarinet, I've got the main melody.

In the viola and violin 2, and violincello,

I've used harmonic interest,

I've added harmony to make the melody more interesting,

but I've also added dynamics, so it doesn't overwhelm the melody.

The students here are telling the players the volume that they want

by indicating it with letters beneath the notes.

P, piano, which is soft.

Forte, loud. And all the gradations in between.

I've actually graded each note - you don't have to do that, of course,

you can just add a set of hairpins,

which tells you to do exactly the same thing.

Tell them where to start and tell them where to finish...

..and the musicians will make their own judgements about how that works.

OK, players, any observations there?

In bar five, you've used the word "staccato"

and a dot over the note that you want short

would have been much easier to read.

If the player wants to translate what you've written on to a page,

they need as much information as possible.

Here's a little tune that I've written,

if I wanted it spikey,

I need to add a staccato dot underneath everything.

That would be lovely.

SINGS MELODY

If I wanted it, on the other hand, smooth,

I could add a slur and that says do that all nicely, smoothly connected.

So Cameron's finished up with a piece which actually really

totally answers the brief, it runs with material from Stravinsky

and makes new melodic material from it, and makes it into

a really successful, strongly structured piece.

The Chairman Dances is a piece from 1987 by John Adams.

It's a companion piece to Nixon In China,

his opera about the meeting of the American President Richard Nixon

and the Chinese Leader Chairman Mao.

Adams very cleverly writes for orchestra,

so the challenge I've given the students is to make

really interesting things happen in terms of mood and atmosphere.

CLARINET PLAYS SOLO

What was the mood of that when you heard it played like that?

-Like a happy mood.

-How does that sound on violin?

VIOLIN PLAYS SAME PIECE OF MUSIC

It's very different, but it's the same tune.

Because they are writing for this instrumental ensemble

drawn from the Philharmonic, they need to know exactly

what the instruments can do and how they can use them

to achieve the different effects that they want to achieve.

I learnt from the ensemble how to play the instrument,

different ways of playing it,

different techniques and, with that, you can

create different atmosphere and you can change the mood of the piece.

The violin has got natural harmonics, which is basically just

a point along the string, and so we have the open string...

PLAYS OPEN STRING

And then we can put our fingers down and play a note, the next G,

but if I lightly press my finger there,

I get this more ethereal sound.

One of the important things that John Adams does is harmony.

He uses melodies, but the harmonies are important.

He makes the chords grow and spread out organically.

Here's the opening of the piece. I've simplified it.

So first of all we get...

And then he adds.

And then he adds.

Then he adds.

So this chord starts tight and spreads out and spreads out

and spreads out.

The students all started from exactly the same point,

which was make a pattern of three, four, or five chords

and just move one note or move two notes and see what happens.

I've reflected John Adams' storyline into my own interpretation of it.

It was government secrets

so it kind of develops, the texture, it's like one instrument

and then flows into more instruments, so it's like whispers.

It's two instruments carrying through,

so this is like a conversation, but as you go down the score,

you can see more instruments joining in. The violin 2, viola

and then the clarinet, so then at this point,

nearly all of the instruments are involved

and then they all just get blown away by the horn at the end.

So it goes from nearly all of the instruments just to one.

I'd like to bring into it the possibility of using

some of Nixon's speech when he resigned.

"I have felt it was my duty to persevere."

PLAYING NOTES "I have felt it was my duty to persevere."

"I would have preferred to carry through to the finish."

Something very daring has happened.

That bit actually spells Watergate.

Lovely, so, W-A-T-E-R-G-A-T-E.

Brilliant, yeah, it does.

I picked some words that I wanted to put into it,

like Nixon, Mao, Watergate, resign.

You just write the seven notes at the top

and then you just go through the alphabet,

so then if you want to write Nixon - the N would be a G, I would be a B,

and so N-I-X-O-N, that's Nixon,

and then M-A-O for Mao.

Because it's to do with politics and stuff like that,

I've been trying to get it as if it's like a speech.

If he says something that I think he'd say really loud

and like emphasise that point, then I'd emphasise it in the music.

And if it's something that wasn't exactly relevant in his speech

and he's going on a bit, then I might have made that a bit quieter.

You've actually deliberately set out to unsettle the listener.

Yeah. I don't want them just to relax.

Of the pieces so far, that's one of the ones that comes closest

to John Adams' way of thinking.

Ross's piece really surprised me, he's really taken to heart

the dramatic possibilities of the ensemble,

working with dissonance, clashing sounds...

He's got the strings playing in the key of E major,

which has got a G sharp in it, and then the horn comes in

playing a G natural, which is a semitone lower than the G sharp.

They actually fight each other for your attention.

And the other thing I like very much is the use of dynamics,

but you've used them to extreme, so it's really dramatic.

Dynamics - telling the players whether you want them

to play loud or soft, for example,

is one way of affecting the atmosphere.

Another way is to think of the articulations, the phrasing -

how do you want those notes to be played?

-How's he going to play that?

-I'm not sure what to do with that,

whether to have it attacking or smoother.

If I'd just written it like that, whatever instrument's playing,

it's going to play it quite separately.

HUMS MELODY

Perhaps not that short, but...

If I wanted it played smoothly, I'm going to add a slur,

so I'm going to add that there,

and that nice smooth shape says, "Play it smoothly, please."

Da-da dee-da.

He said that it would be good to put in some phrasing here,

so it's... Like, for the violin, it would be one bow stroke going,

"der-der-der" instead of "dun-dun-dun".

It makes it sound a lot smoother and flow more,

where here, it would be more sharper.

Georgia came up with a really stunning boppy idea...

..and then she said, "What do I do with it?"

LAUGHTER Georgia's idea is great,

but it needed developing and a really simple way

to develop it is, one, to repeat it on one instrument

and then to have the same idea on another instrument,

but starting slightly later.

So they're working in canon.

The pieces here have really captured the spirit of John Adams.

They have made pieces that are theirs

but there's a really strong element

of knowing how John Adams makes his music work.

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