musical composition

musical composition, the act of conceiving a piece of music, the art of creating music, or the finished product. These meanings are interdependent and presume a tradition in which musical works exist as repeatable entities. In this sense, composition is necessarily distinct from improvisation.

Societal perspectives

Whether referring to the process or to the completed work, composition implies the creation of a unique musical event that may or may not be based on original musical materials. At certain cultural levels and in many non-Western societies, unique performance characteristics tend to assume greater significance than composition itself. In oral traditions, related variants of common origin often take the place of unalterable musical entities, so that tune families rather than single autonomous tunes form the collective repertoire. Where certain patterns of musical structure have gained broad recognition (as the ragas, or melody types, of India), musicians will as a rule rework such patterns extemporaneously though in accordance with prevailing conventions.

European music was communicated orally well into the Middle Ages and received important stimuli from a variety of oral traditions even after musical notation had developed to a high degree of precision. Indeed, the lower population strata, especially in rural areas, never abandoned the relative freedom that comes from reliance on the ear alone, and the sophisticated music of the upper strata, throughout its rapid evolution, rarely severed its connection with folk music altogether. Ultimately, the process of composition, as seen by the American musicologist Alan P. Merriam, does “not seem to differ radically between literate and non-literate peoples save in the question of writing.” As a conscious act of social communication it always “involves learning, is subject to public acceptance and rejection, and is therefore a part of the broad learning process which contributes, in turn, to the processes of stability and change.” Whether explicitly or not, composition is thus subject to rules that represent the stylistic consensus of a specific segment of society at a given stage of cultural development. During the Middle Ages, when man’s natural instincts were held in particularly low esteem, musical compositions were often judged primarily in terms of their adherence to the rules. Hence, the supreme authority in matters musical was the musicus as theorist; only he was considered sufficiently conversant with musical science to vouchsafe its continued existence as the sonorous embodiment of universal truths. And it was because the metaphysical properties of numbers were allegedly embedded in the rules of composition that music, on a par with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, attained and retained an honorable place as a constituent member of the quadrivium, the more exalted of the two divisions of the seven liberal arts. Characteristically, music was not classified with grammar, rhetoric, and logic, the “rhetorical arts” gathered in the trivium. About 1300, musical composition as a mere craft was ranked by Johannes de Grocheo, a shrewd observer of the Parisian musical scene, with shoemaking and tanning.

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Musical elements

At its most fundamental level the act of composition involves the ordering of pitched sounds in musical time and space. Pitch relationships are referred to as intervals; their specific occurrence in musical time is determined by rhythm, a concept that embraces all durational aspects of music. Rhythm in turn may or may not be regulated by metre. In metrically organized rhythm, recurring patterns of accented and unaccented “beats” furnish a durational substructure that necessarily affects all the other elements of composition, including the nature of melody, harmony, and texture. Metrical rhythm is nearly always present in dance music because its patterning is largely analogous to that of bodily motions and step figurations. But logogenic, or word-determined, music also often employs metrical patterns, corresponding as a rule to those of the poetic text. The first large corpus of logogenic compositions transmitted through the ages is that of medieval plainchant, consisting of monophonic settings (limited to a single melodic line) of liturgical texts for the entire year, based on a system of eight church modes, diatonic scales abstracted from the melodic motives utilized by medieval singers. Modality—whether referring to a melodic or a rhythmic framework—furnishes compositional frames of reference in a wide variety of essentially monophonic musical styles, especially in Asia. Asian influences upon early European music cannot be ruled out, whether by way of ancient Judaea, Greece, Byzantium, or the medieval Arab invasions. But unlike their Asian counterparts, Europeans at first limited modality to melody, through pitch arrangements. The rhythmic properties of plainchant have largely remained a matter of conjecture, for no systematic discussion of plainchant rhythm survives, and the notation used was noncommittal with respect to rhythm. By the same token, plainchant no doubt owed much of its amazing vitality to the absence of an all-encompassing notation, which made possible the flexibility of performance and regional variation inherent in a partly written, partly oral tradition.

Music like medieval plainchant, in which the lengths of individual tones tend to be rather uniform, is often referred to as nonrhythmic or rhythmless. Such careless terminology denies the very essence of music as a temporal art, which implies by definition the omnipresence of rhythm as “order in musical time.” Actually, the relative presence or lack of rhythmic differentiation in the duration of tones can act as a decisive stylistic determinant. Thus the rhythmic equanimity of the monophonic plainchant, at least in the interpretation set forth by the 19th-century Benedictine monks of Solesmes, France, and recognized as authoritative by the Roman Catholic Church, effectively symbolizes an atmosphere of faith and inner peace. By contrast, the strictly metrical organization of rhythm in most 18th-century music reflects the thinking of an age of reason, favouring mathematically definable, hence “natural,” structures in its music.

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Sound Check: Musical Vocabulary Quiz

The smallest melodic-rhythmic unit (minimally two separately perceived sounds) is the motive. Pitched sounds are, however, not of the essence: drum motives are so effective rhythmically precisely because they lack pitch definition. By and large, rhythmic motives are used to endow pitch relationships with identifiable durational characteristics. And consequently rhythmic identity often serves to establish motive connections between different intervals. A famous case in point is the opening short–short–short–long motif of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Opus 67, which serves as an effective element of structural cohesion in this large-scale work.

Types of melody owe their aesthetic associations in many instances to their motivic peculiarities. In Western music motivic contrast has been identified with emotional conflict since at least the mid-16th century, when composers of madrigals (Italian polyphonic secular songs) began to set dramatic texts. The opening of Mozart’s Symphony No. 35 in D Major, K 385 (the Haffner Symphony), offers an excellent example. Analogous in its motivic structure to a section of the first act of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, the opening of the symphony engenders emotional contrasts similar to those inherent in the opera’s dramatic action when Donna Anna, under the double impact of attempted rape and her father’s violent death at the Don’s hands, impulsively rejects Don Ottavio’s sympathy until, realizing that she has no one else to rely on for help, she reverses herself and induces him to swear revenge. Conversely, melodic lyricism correlates with a high degree of motive affinity.

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