Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Trying to compose (don't laugh):

Hey, I've just begun working on a piece, and because I haven't gone to college yet, I'm mostly working by ear. It will be in the style of Ravel or Debussy, probably a combination. Problem though.

I have a very pretty ending that I thought of, but right now the beginning and middle and basically everything except that end. Hopefully it'll all work out... any tips from those composers out there?

The best thing to do is to feel with your 'soul', but compose with your mind. Compositions need a good balance of intellect and heart, take a look at Beethoven or Chopin. Also, always try to be genuine and not conceal feelings or other emotions.

Before I start to fool around composing I think of what period I will compose in.
Lets say I pick Romantic!

After that I go to my computer and listen maybe like 10 minutes to romantic style music, maybe to some chopin.

Then I go back to my piano and it is much easier this way to compose romantic music!

Thats my little technique, I would love to hear other peoples.

My pieces , to be brutally honest with myself, are just improvisations which won't go away, and keep turning up at the keyboard in various guises. When it reaches the stage that they're the same two or three times running I know I have a rough show of writing them out - if I can be bothered - which isn't very often ! Writing things out is horrible....horrible. The page is usually black with notes and patches of twink and I get very ratty. I've been known to play and carry in my head several pieces for months without writing them out.

I can't "decide" to compose anything. Starting a piece at the beginning and trying to write as I go along, which is the way most composers seem to work, is a tried and true recipe for disaster.

Fortunately I'm neither a particularly good pianist nor a proper musician so nobody expects anything of me. That's how I like it.

Hehe I never write anything out, its all in my head, and I never seem to forget anything!
I heard of some other composers doing this, was it Bach??

I like to compose and the ways at which I go about doing it are always different each time. My Preludes in F-Major and C-Major, which I shared with you here on the board a while back, was me sitting at the piano and just messing around with different notes and chords until I found something that I liked, and then built some onto it, usually in the same theme throughout, but sometimes changing. Other times, I'll have a tune in my head that I try to reconstruct on my piano. And yet other times, I just sit down at my computer, boot up Sibelius, and make something in there. I have some compostions from that technique that I can't even play, even though it IS playable!!! (This was the technique that I used at school most of the time for my MIDI lab class). Anyway, I when I compose, I just find something and keep playing it over and over again until I have it memorized before writing it out on paper and then putting the notes into Sibelius. This is because (and I've tried this before) if I create a passage that I really like and then try to write it out right away, I forget the notes that I've played and can't find them again by the time I've written in the first couple. Anyway, all my compositions eventually end up in Sibelius. However, I do have quite a few compositions that I haven't written out at all yet that are old ones. I have at least 5 that I can think of right now off the top of my head that I composed well over a year ago (one of them dating back to even about 2 1/2 years ago now!) that I still play to this day and remember, even if I have gone long periods at a time without playing them, and I haven't even begun to write them out yet!

Ted2- I am exactly the same way! Right now I have the third movement of my piano trio circling in my head. (The third movement is the only one that I've actually started putting on paper, though I have the concepts for the other two in my head.) It's one of the few pieces I've started writing that I actually think is good for longer than a day! I'm pretty excited about it.

I also have my clarinet (soon to be transcribed for cello) solo piece in my mind somewhere. My "deadline" for it was last November. Hmm. Sure didn't get that one finished!! It's a birthday present for my friend, so I can just finish it and give it to her this year. (Now that I'll be starting college and will have access to a computer program to print the music with.)