The Key To Musical Composition (no pun intended)

I have been thinking about what to do for my next blog post, and finally decided to do some research on the questions: what is the key to musical composition? Do you have to be a genius like Mozart? Where do you start? Well, seeing as I do not have much experience with composition, I decided I'd do a bit of research. Here is what I came up with:

Once you choose the key your piece will be in (which you can probably do by just randomly messing around and seeing what key you like best), you should always stay true to that key. You can't just start the piece of in A minor and switch to B flat major later.

Also, the key a piece is in determines the mood of the piece, as minor could be mysterious, sad, melancholy, or angry, and major could be happy, in love, excited, or bubbly.

Another element to composition is appeal to the listener. For instance, if you think about which melodies might be appealing to many different people, you might not want it to be very out there or crazy, unless the listeners you are appealing to are into that. Conversely, if your audience is more into your average, more traditional style of music, then you may want to include things in your piece such as a strong melody that comes back many times.

One more thing to think about when composing a piece is if you are copying a piece that has already been composed. It's sometimes a great idea to get ideas from other melodies of pieces, but its best to at least slightly tweak them, as opposed to taking a melody from another piece and incorporating it into your own piece. Not only is this a form of plagiarism, but no one likes a piece that sounds exactly the same as an already made piece.

Also, when thinking about how to find inspirations of composition, you should always try your best NOT to perfectly identify the emotion that inspired you to compose the piece. This is because when composing a piece, it makes it more interesting and enjoyable if there are many emotions intertwined and embedded under the music. But then again, too many emotions can end up in the confusion of the listener, or conflicting emotions within the piece, even though you should still have separate parts of the piece that don't necessarily have to display the same emotion. You just have to make sure that the emotions are understandable enough that the listener is able to make an educated guess as to why the emotions were put together.

And so there you have it - now go out an compose a piece!