Composers Unite!

[Darth Mario]

Three Dances (At Once) (http://youtube.com/watch?v=2qrSczTcNRY), by me.

Anyone else here write music of any sort?

[Darth Mario]

Edited first post to be less egotistical.

C'mon, show your tunes!

[Raistlin1040]

I write music. Unfortunantly, it's not good enough to be publically shown.

[Evil_Pacifist]

When I first saw this thread, I misread it as "Composters Unite!", and I was all like "Yay! I compost! Why, I took the mulch out just yesterday! It smelled like crap.", but then I saw it was "Composers Unite!", and I was all like "Meh, I don't compose". :smallfrown:

I do, however, often simply sit down at my instrument of choice and simply let the evil flow forth in the form of some dreadful amalgamation of stuff that might be songs I had bouncing around in my greasy head, but also might not be, or something. In any case, I've never written anything down.

...

Nice shirt.

[Darth Mario]

Hey, composers are also composters. The trash can is the writer's best friend.

...

Nice hat.

[ZombieRockStar]

http://www.mediafire.com/?5amg0dymjzd

Excuse my bad recording. I don't know how to work something as simple as Garage Band. :smallsigh:

I actually do also have a piece of traditional "composed" music...something for viola and piano. Unfortunately, I could never play piano like I wrote it, so it goes unrecorded.

@V: Fixed.

[Darth Mario]

ZombieRockStar, I'm not able to view your file. I'm getting an error message that says "invalid quickkey". Try a different hosting service?

[Mephibosheth]

I do a bit o' songwriting now and again. A few friends and I have a "band" and we've written quite a few songs and recorded a self-produced album. Check out PureVolume (http://www.purevolume.com/ruckusfray) (Who Are We Fooling and Where I Will Go are completely original, Kryptonite and Let the Bodies Hit the Floor are covers with completely new instrumentation) or MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/ruckusfray) (Tower Drive and Red Scare are also originals) for some samples of our music. The quality is...decent considering we recorded/mixed/mastered/produced the album entirely ourselves. Let me know what you think.

Note: I've posted these songs here before, so this might be old hat to some.

Mephibosheth

[rubakhin]

Can I unite with you guys for a little while? I have no musical training (unless you count breaking into my piano-owning neighbor's house with a Learn Piano booklet while they're at work) and no talent, but in my stupidity I've decided I need to write a novel in which composing plays a role.

The problem is, I just don't know how a composer goes about writing his stuff. Can anyone give me some insight into the creation process? For what it's worth, it's Russia, it's 1939, and he's trying to put together a fugue in E minor.

[Simius]

Can I unite with you guys for a little while? I have no musical training (unless you count breaking into my piano-owning neighbor's house with a Learn Piano booklet while they're at work) and no talent, but in my stupidity I've decided I need to write a novel in which composing plays a role.

The problem is, I just don't know how a composer goes about writing his stuff. Can anyone give me some insight into the creation process? For what it's worth, it's Russia, it's 1939, and he's trying to put together a fugue in E minor.

Did you ever read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell? It's a great book, and one of the main characters is a composer (and he lives in the 1920's IIRC).

[Castaras]

I do a little bit of composing for my music lessons...Quite a bit of fun...

But I won't unite. I REFUSE to unite.

[Death, your friend the Reaper]

*Death holds up a sign that has changing slogans on it written in absolute darkness. Ones such as

"Undead have rights to!"

and

"Decomposers unite!"*

[Sir_Norbert]

Rubakhin:

There are a couple of specific ways in which the creation process will be different because it's a fugue. Sorry if I'm treating you like an idiot and you already know this stuff, but you say you have "no musical training" so I'll start from the very beginning.

A fugue always begins with a single melody, called a subject, played on its own, and then a second part enters with the same melody while the first goes into a "countersubject" that harmonises with the subject. (The second part can be another instrument, or if this is a fugue for piano, it'll just be another line of melody played at the same time.) There may then be a third part, and a fourth -- any number really, but the complexity drastically increases with the number of parts, so three or four is most usual. Each part must begin by stating the subject and after that they can do anything, but to keep the piece thematically unified, the subject is virtually always brought back again and again in different ways and combinations, often with different parts of it harmonising with itself.

So... main point of all that is, you can't even begin unless you've thought of the subject first and you feel it has enough potential to be the main theme of an entire piece. Once he's got his subject, he'll next try to put together a countersubject that goes with it and then try to develop the harmony in however many parts he's using. He may plot some sort of scheme out in advance, deciding when the subject will return and what "episodes" (intervals in between returns of the subject) there will be. If he's a real genius, like Bach, he may see all this in a flash just from looking at the subject :P

[Sir_Norbert]

Oh, and here are some of my compositions:

http://www.geocities.com/zarathustra47/Waltz.mid

"A Waltz for Daisy", a birthday present for one of my friends in college. My favourite among my own compositions, but the midi version is not the best quality (you miss all the nuances of dynamic and expression that I can put into it when I play it on a real piano).

http://www.geocities.com/zarathustra47/Telperion.mid

The melody for one of my songs that I recently had occasion to link to in another thread: http://www.geocities.com/zarathustra47/Telperion.html

http://www.geocities.com/zarathustra47/31b.mid

A setting of a song written by my ex-girlfriend. Lyrics not available.

[Darth Mario]

[snip]
So... main point of all that is, you can't even begin unless you've thought of the subject first and you feel it has enough potential to be the main theme of an entire piece. Once he's got his subject, he'll next try to put together a countersubject that goes with it and then try to develop the harmony in however many parts he's using. He may plot some sort of scheme out in advance, deciding when the subject will return and what "episodes" (intervals in between returns of the subject) there will be. If he's a real genius, like Bach, he may see all this in a flash just from looking at the subject :P

If he's writing in E minor, your composer will likely transpose to G major, B minor and A minor before he's done. Also, the final episode often has multiples of the subject played at once, starting at different times, so it should be able to harmonize with itself.

Good luck!

Edit: Also, self-loathing and self-pity are neccesary for any composer worth his salt, but you likely know this already.

[Dallas-Dakota]

Sometimes I compose, with keyboard.
But when I look at it, I change it becouse I dont like it and then its rubbish, but the first one is usually good to some degree.

[Narmoth]

my myspace (http://myspace.com/narmoth)
so you know who it it if I add you :smallcool:

[Darth Mario]

"Decomposers unite!"*

Oh, I've done my share of decomposing my compositions...