Musical composition : craft and art

273 Pages·2018·3.231 MB·English

by  Alan Belkin

MUSICAL COMPOSITION
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MUSICAL
COMPOSITION
CRAFT AND ART
ALAN BELKIN
NEW HAVEN & LONDON
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Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip
Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College.
Copyright © 2018 by Alan Belkin.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations,
in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the
U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without
written permission from the publishers.
Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational,
business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail sales.press@ yale
.edu (U.S. offi ce) or [email protected] (U.K. offi ce).
Set in Meridien and Futura type by Newgen North America.
P rinted in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017956623
ISBN 978-0-300-21899-2 (paperback: alk. paper)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence
of Paper).
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
1 Motive 1
2 Phrase 16
3 Singing 25
4 Playing 34
5 Punctuating 45
6 Presenting 59
7 One-Part Forms 70
8 Ternary Form 77
9 Binary Form 84
10 Variation Form 91
11 Contrasting 105
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12 Connecting 115
13 Progressing 131
14 Rondo Form 141
15 Beginning 151
16 Exploring 161
17 Returning 173
18 Ending 178
19 Sonata Form 186
20 Refi nements 198
Conclusion:
From the Craft to the Art of Composition 210
Appendix A:
Sketching 215
Appendix B:
Presenting Your Piece to the World 220
Notes 229
Credits 241
Index 243
vi CONTENTS
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, my thanks to Andrew Schartmann, who encouraged
me to write this book and to propose it to Yale University Press. He also made
numerous detailed and perceptive comments on the fi rst draft of the text.
Matthew Lane also spent many hours carefully commenting on the en-
tire book in great detail; his numerous suggestions were always specifi c and
constructive.
Maxime Samarov read the book from cover to cover and had many use-
ful things to say, both musical and pedagogical.
Sylvain Caron commented perceptively on several chapters.
Michel Edward and Eric Jones-Cadieux gave me useful suggestions for
examples from fi lm and video-game music. Eric also took care of the many
copyright requests and permissions for the twentieth-century examples.
Thanks to Maxime Goulet for explaining to me various particularities of
music for video games, and also for giving me some intriguing ideas for exer-
cises relevant to composers aiming to compose for video games and for fi lms.
I am grateful to Nikolaï Miletenko and Thomas Goss for carefully proof-
reading the manuscript. Thanks to Fred Kameny for the index.
My best friend, Charles Lafl eur, was a constant source of encouragement
and thoughtful refl ection while this project was underway. Both are enor-
mously appreciated.
Thanks to Sarah Miller, Ash Lago, Harry Haskell, and the rest of the team
at Yale University Press for their help in bringing this project to completion.
There are too many people to name who have contributed to my ideas
about composition and composition pedagogy over the years, but I really
must at least mention my teachers at Juilliard, David Diamond and Elliott
Carter, who set me on such an interesting path.
Obviously, whatever weaknesses remain are mine alone.
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INTRODUCTION
Teaching musical composition today has become a very complicated en-
deavor, owing to the students’ unprecedented variety of needs, interests,
and backgrounds.
Overall, there are three broad categories of students studying musical
composition at the undergraduate level: those aiming to compose concert
music; those aiming at a career writing functional music for fi lm, theatre, TV,
video games, publicity, and so forth;1 and those whose main interest lies in
theory or musicology, but who nonetheless want to have some insight into
a composer’s point of view.
Making the teacher’s problem even more complex, above and beyond
these disparate needs, the concert music of the past century has seen an
unprecedented level of stylistic fragmentation. A composer of concert music
could be writing in a hyper-complex style, like that of Brian Ferneyhough, or
applying electro-acoustic techniques to harmonic spectra, like Tristan Murail,
or else writing somewhat minimalist, tonal music, like John Adams. Even
popular music today encompasses many different styles. How can one teach
composition in a way that effectively addresses all these different needs?
Existing composition textbooks either focus exclusively on the classical
repertoire or else simply catalog various more or less recent stylistic trends,
with short chapters devoted to each one.
Arnold Schoenberg’s Fundamentals of Musical Composition remains the
best model of the former type, and it still contains much useful material, as
well as a host of examples, with many useful comments by the author.2
The other kind of book focuses on what is distinct and unusual about
each new style. While certainly of interest to a contemporary composer, this
approach is of limited use to someone who wants to acquire more widely
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