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. 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. Composition is thus necessarily distinct from improvisation, though in the second half of the 20th century, audiences have sometimes been confronted with compositions consisting more or less of improvisation. Although it is possible for music to be composed without being notated (e.g., much Balinese music), in Western civilization musical composition refers to the finished work primarily, as fixed by a complex system of graphic notation or by sound recordings. Throughout the Middle Ages, European music was communicated orally and received stimuli from various oral traditions even after musical notation (q.v.) began developing. The beginning of music publishing in the 16th century gave impetus to fixed notation, but even Johann Sebastian Bach felt it quite natural to adapt works from one performance to another, and it was only at the end of the 18th century that publication began to give a definite form to most created music. Significantly, it was also at this time that the standard genres were developed: the symphony, the string quartet, the solo concerto, and the art song. If the notion of composition has thus grown increasingly definitive in line with developments in publishing and recording, the mental processes involved in composition remain obscure. There are countless anecdotes about composers conceiving works in imagination before writing down a note (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sir Edward Elgar), hearing works in dreams (Igor Stravinsky, Karlheinz Stockhausen), or responding to angelic dictation (Palestrina, George Frideric Handel). In most cases, however, the creation of a musical work would seem to come about through the dialogue of imagination with the more tangible realm of notation, or practical performance, or both. Many composers, among them Stravinsky, have found it almost impossible to compose without a piano at hand to test the result at every stage, and, though some have not found this to be necessary, the evidence suggests that composition nearly always involves trial in the form of sketches. Composition, at the most fundamental level, involves the ordering of pitched sounds in time and spacecombining melody, harmony, and rhythm into a purposeful whole. Pitch relationships are known as intervals. Melody, as it is known in Western music, consists of a series of single notes deliberately arranged in a pattern and chosen from a pre-existing series that has been handed down by tradition or is accepted as a convention. It need not be in a regular rhythm, but it is impossible for it to be entirely unrhythmical, since notes have duration in time and some are likely to be shorter than others. The presence of a pre-existing series, which is called a scale, is characteristic of the music of more developed cultures. Harmony's influence on a composition as a whole can be even more far-reaching than that of melody. The length of a melody is limited by practical considerations: the ear cannot grasp it if it is extended beyond a reasonable limit. When it has had its say it must either give place to something else or be subjected to variation or development. Harmony, the sounding of two or more notes simultaneously and their movement to other chords, does not have to be tailored in this way; though its progress over a long stretch must be logical, the ear tends rather to hear it in sections and then to link the sections together. Rhythm, the element of time in music, is not the same as metre, which, as in poetry, is a regular pulse. Just as the accents in poetry do not necessarily coincide with the beats of the metre, so in musicthough the listener will be aware of a regular pulse, if only subconsciouslythere is no reason for the rhythm to be tied to it. In fact there is far more freedom in music than in poetry because of the opportunity of introducing shorter note values than would be possible within the framework of metrical verse. The composer can use the tone qualities of instruments or voices to give colour, and the treatment of harmony will necessarily be affected, to some extent, by the performance instrument; e.g., a dissonance that is relatively mild on the piano may sound unpleasantly harsh on the organ. Orchestral colour may be a vital element in the structure of the composition. The composer may pass the individual notes of a melody from one instrument to another or write an elliptical harmony that leaves the listener to imagine the missing link. But whatever method or idiom the composer uses, he must work with the basic elements of melody, harmony, and rhythm. Additional reading Because most writings on musical composition were conceived as didactic treatises for would-be composers, their content has virtually no bearing on a better understanding of crucial aesthetic attitudes and mental processes. Instead, depending on the era from which they hail as well as the specific outlook of their authors, such treatises deal for the most part with contrapuntal rules, harmonic laws, and the like. While numerous books of this type appeared through the ages, it was only with the creation of the educational institutions known as conservatories of music, following the lead of the National Conservatory of France established in the last years of the 18th century, that composition became a discipline formally taught and hence requiring comprehensive textbooks, including the theory of form and instrumentation. This profitable need was satisfied by the voluminous activities of 19th-century writers from J.J. Momigny and Anton Reicha to Vincent d'Indy in France and from Heinrich Christoph Koch to Hugo Riemann in Germany. Few of these books were translated into English, and they are of primary interest to the specialist. The following is a selection of easily accessible monographs and documentary collections with emphasis on firsthand testimonies of the creative artists themselves.Jacques Barzun (ed.), Pleasures of Music (1951), a collection of writings about music, including many from the pens of men of literature; Leonard Bernstein, The Joy of Music (1959), contains Bernstein's seven Omnibus television scripts, including his excellent comments on sketch materials relating to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and its ultimate realization; Frederick Dorian, The Musical Workshop (1947), a discussion of various aspects of musical composition, including comments on creative procedures; Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (1947), rare insights into the problems of cinematographic music from a composer who, during his Hollywood years, tried to turn music into an integral aspect of film art; Max Graf, From Beethoven to Shostakovich (1947, reprinted 1969), a popular study of psychological processes involved in composition; Michael Hamburger (ed. and trans.), Beethoven: Letters, Journals and Conversations (1960), a concise but well-chosen selection of Beethoven's own words concerning both specific compositions and the problems of the composer in general; Lejaren A. Hiller, Jr., and Leonard M. Isaacson, Experimental Music (1959), the first and still basic monograph dealing with the philosophy, procedures, and techniques of composition with an electronic computer; Paul Hindemith, A Composer's World (1961), a leading 20th-century composer looks at various facets of the composer's world, including questions of musical perception, inspiration, technique, performance, and education; Irving Kolodin (ed.), The Composer as Listener: A Guide to Music (1958), excerpts from pertinent writings, including letters mostly by important composers of the 19th and early 20th centuries; Edward E. Lowinsky, Musical Genius: Evolution and Origins of a Concept, Musical Quarterly, 50:321340, 476495 (1964), excellent documentation of the evolution of a concept that has been associated through the ages more consistently with music than with any other form of artistic production; Alan P. Merriam, The Anthropology of Music (1964), a comprehensive treatment of music in relation to culture, drawing upon fieldwork on every continent and at all social levels (see especially ch. 9, The Process of Composition); Sam Morgenstern (ed.), Composers on Music: An Anthology of Composers' Writings from Palestrina to Copland (1956), an excellent collection, mostly of letters, dealing with general and specific aspects of the composer's work; Ernest Newman, The Unconscious Beethoven, rev. ed. (1970), a fascinating, if not unproblematic, study of the successive stages of Beethoen's work as revealed in his sketches by one of Britain's most famous critics; Gertrude Norman and Miriam Lubell Shrifte (eds.), Letters of Composers: An Anthology, 16031945 (1946), one of the most comprehensive of several collections of composers' letters available in paperback; Josef Rufer, Die Komposition mit zwlf Tnen (1952, 2nd ed. 1966; Eng. trans., Composition with Twelve Notes Related to One Another, 1965), a cogent introduction to dodecaphonic aesthetics and technique by a dedicated Schoenberg disciple; Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea (1950), a discussion of Schoenberg's artistic motivation and procedures as well as those of the composers he admired most, including Brahms and Mahler; Roger Sessions, The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, Listener (1962), a discussion of fundamental musical problems by the American composer; William Oliver Strunk (ed.), Source Readings in Music History from Classical Antiquity Through the Romantic Era (1950), an indispensable collection of relevant excerpts from the writings of philosophers, musical theorists, and composers from Plato to Richard Wagner; Donald Francis Tovey, The Mainstream of Music, and Other Essays (1961), a paperback reprint of some of the finest essays by the great British critic, who discusses basic compositional issues. See also Erich Leinsdorf, The Composer's Advocate (1981).