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!

New Song-Learning Followup

Well, I suppose I have fulfilled my goal of learning that new piece from my last blog post. I learned it...for the most part, but the only YouTube video on how to learn it only had part of the song. So I learned what it provided, and it was a pretty cool experience. It wasn't really that hard; I didn't expect it to be as basic as it turned out to be. But in the end, it was interesting since I usually don't play the genre it was classified under; I mostly play more classical. Here is the video of me from last Friday, playing on the Baldwin (just like the piano I have at home) at school, when I first began to work on and learn the piece (obviously it won't sound very...put together, seeing as this was the very first time I learned the piece, but I guess you could say I am too lazy to record and post another video of me playing the piece, now that I can actually play it...because uploading these videos has been a NIGHTMARE!!!!):

Bruce Adolphe - Piano Puzzler

I first heard of Bruce Adolphe on the “Piano Puzzler” on KHFM, the classical radio station. I thought his work sounded really cool – he creates a Piano Puzzler for KHFM every few days. The Piano Puzzler is a song he remixes so that it mimics the distinct style of a composer. The time that I heard the Piano Puzzler, he had remixed the song “If I Only Had A Brain,” from the Wizard of Oz, into the style of Johann Sebastian Bach. The reason it is called the Piano Puzzler on KHFM is because they call someone up, and play the Piano Puzzler for them, and then the contestant on the phone has to guess what song it is, and which composer is being mimicked. If they do, they usually win some sort of prize, but it’s really hard to do. I couldn’t even guess it until they told me what it was at the end. It was pretty cool, so I thought I’d look up a little bit about him.

Bruce Adolphe was born in 1955, and has lived in the U.S. all his life. He is a composer and pianist, and has been doing the Piano Puzzler ever it started on National Public Radio. He has composed pieces for many different symphonies and orchestras, even including the National Symphony and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, has composed things from operas to violin concertos. Below is a picture of Bruce Adolphe:

Some past Piano Puzzlers Bruce Adolphe has composed include “Til There Was You,” from the Music Man (musical), “On Top of Old Smokey,” and “London Bridge is Falling Down.” Click the link below to go to a site of many of the recent Piano Puzzlers, and if you scroll down to March 9^th, 2011, you can hear the exact same one I heard of “If I Only Had Brain,” even though I just gave it away…but you can still guess the other ones, and at the end they tell you both the piece and mimicked-composer:

http://performancetoday.publicradio.org/podcast/piano_puzzler/

New Piece - C'etait Salement Romantique

Today, I am starting to learn a new piece called "C'etait Salement Romantique," by Coeur De Pirate (the girl who wrote it). It's a more modern piece, since I thought I'd try something new and different, as I usually play classical. The name means something like "a bad romance." I don't have the sheet music for it, unfortunately, so I am learning off of a YouTube video, which is semi-frustrating. But I have gotten the main gist of it, as I practiced and learned it at school during my Tech class.
I will be posting more about it on Tuesday, which will also (hopefully) include a video of the practicing I did at school. So check out the video and POST A COMMENT, PLEASE! :)

What It Was Like to Play "Minuet in G"

I found Minuet in G by Ignace Paderewski an enjoyable piece to play, despite a lot of repetition, as the melody came many times. Some of the ending was a bit hard, especially the trills, which I had to work quite a bit on. But otherwise, it was a nice, simple little piece. It took me...say, 3 months to completely master this piece, dynamics and all. And take into account that during that time I may have been unable to have a piano lesson, for various reasons, and therefore could not totally continue to master it, seeing as I did not have my teacher's feedback, etc. Anyway, all in all, I liked playing this piece. Hope you enjoyed my playing it! >>(see last post)

Minuet in G - Ignace Paderewski (performed by me)

Man playing a burning piano!