All musicality requires creativity. Whether you are interpreting a piece of music written by another composer, arranging it for a different ensemble, composing your own music, or improvising over the music of someone else, you are involved in a creative process. Even something as trivial as creating as exercise out of a section of music is a creative act. If you are not interested in further pursuing creativity in music in the form of composition and improvisation, this section may not be necessary. I would suggest, however, to give composition and improvisation a go for two reasons: it is fun, and it is also a great way to understand music.
I consider composition and improvisation to be two ends of the same continuum of creating music. On one end you have time to revise, delete, and perfect the music you are creating, on the other, you are creating music in real time with no ability to backtrack or correct mistakes. Composition is slowed down improvisation, and improvisation is real time composition. Practising one will inevitably improve the other.
In the Musicality chapter, I stressed the importance of listening and introduced the common analogy between music and language. This analogy continues to be useful in the context of learning to compose and improvise. Learning to compose is akin to learning to speak. Once we have listened and absorbed enough of the language, it is relatively effortless to combine words to construct meaning. However, if we want to write poetry like Shakespeare, or prose like Dickens, we are going to need to study. We need to find the composers and improvisers that inspire us. The combination of what we find interesting in each, as well as our personal views, ideas and opinions are what will form our unique style.
Finding the materials for studying composition of classical music will be relatively easy: most scores are publicly available. But for most other genres of music, you will have to listen to the music and write it down yourself, a process called transcribing. Even if you have the score available, I would recommend to try and transcribe the music. It will give you a deeper understanding of what resonates with you about the music; and it also happens to be one of the best ways to train your ear.
Transcription
Transcription is not pedagogy-friendly. There isn’t a lot of teaching to be done on that front. You have to jump in the water, and learn to swim. Here are some tips to make it feel like you are not drowning:
- Start by transcribing piano: the similarity of timbre will help identify the pitches.
- Work in small sections: in the beginning, you should pick phrases that are small enough that you can complete it in a single session.
- Listen to it a lot: Some teachers would even go as far as to instruct you to not attempt to transcribe it until you can audiate it completely (or even better, sing it out loud). I don’t think you need to go that far for everything, but listen as much as you can.
- Use software to slow it down: Audacity is a free software you can use for that purpose.
- When transcribing chords, work from the outside in: the top and bottom notes are usually the easiest to pick out – once you’ve done that, you can start guessing what the inner notes are.
If you are transcribing for jazz and improvisation, you should also try to play along as soon as possible, and pay very close attention to the phrasing. For jazz in particular, the phrasing plays a crucial role in the quality of a line, and it shouldn’t be ignored. Even if you are transcribing another instrument, try to emulate the phrasing and the tone as much as possible.
Analysis and application
Inspiration can lead us blindly to create mediocre copies of the musicians we love most. By stealing – that is – making something our own, we are taking control of our identity, crafting our sound with intent.
Having put in a lot of effort transcribing a piece of music, you may think the work is now done. You would be wrong. The most important part is still to come. Transcription is just a way to acquire the music in front of you for the purpose of analysing it. What we want to do is extract concepts, not the ideas themselves, but the means to get those ideas. We want to learn how to think like our favourite composers, not what they thought.
Go through the section of interest and highlight any of the relevant musical characteristics that explain why this section is appealing to you. It may be a particular scale, or rhythm, it could be a chord voicing, or the way that a motif is developed. I wouldn’t highlight more than three or four, so that you are able to give enough attention and detail to each.
Next, we want to turn each of these descriptions into prescriptions: prompts for application to our own music. Application could mean anything from composing a line (also known in jazz as a lick) to a whole piece, or simply improvising with a particular rhythm in mind. You can read some of my analyses from my time at university to give you an idea. I’ve also included supplementary readings and resources if you want more concrete exercises and examples of how to apply concepts to composition and improvisation.
- Transcription Analysis #1 | Nemesis – Aaron Parks
- Transcription Analysis #2 | ‘Round About Midnight – Kurt Rosenwinkel
Further reading
- Alan Belkin, Musical Composition: Craft and Art
- Hal Crook, How to Improvise
