« Premiere tonight in New York city
Performance Paradigm (# 4) 2008 Emergences: 21st Century Performance »

From elementary school through college, music composition and theory pedagogy often focuses on beginning from a set a “safe” rules. While this demonstrates some reasons why familiar music sounds “right,” such exercises rarely produce expressive or interesting music. Such compositions are typically void of dots and accidentals and do not much resemble “real” musical works–something about the musical experience is missing from approaches like these.

In the following process, students rely heavily on listening and spatial reasoning, and they learn not to be afraid of wrong notes and revising. Because the process begins with a poem and includes drawing a graphic score, this project could be tied into learning goals in Reading and Art classes.

You might think of the “safe” approach as setting up such rigid fences for students that it’s hard for the students’ creative though to squeeze through them. “Real” music has irregular rhythms and tonalities, and composers have various reasons for arriving at those results. The following is an approach to creating music that puts the traditional “safe” rules aside and explores other ways of putting music together. By thinking in terms of visual structure, such as motive, gesture, and texture, students can set aside scales and “ti-ti”s momentarily, and create music that is characteristically unlike that resulting from traditional approaches. Traditional structuring principles like scales and simple rhythms can them be used selectively and judiciously to “tame” some parts of the resulting music.

Background

Thinking of Music in Visual Terms:

Procedure

  1. Open the provided GarageBand file and listen to the poem. To listen to it:
    1. Press space or click the play button to play.
    2. Press space again or click the play button again to stop.
    3. Press enter or click rewind to return to the beginning.
    4. Drag the “play head” (the downward-pointing triangle in the timeline) to go to a specifc point in the recording.
  2. Thinking about the poem
    1. What kind of movement or change is in the poem?
    2. Find a few phrases that are significant in the poem. Are there any opposites? Repeated phrases?
    3. What are the most significant events or vivid images presented in the poem?
  3. Turn phrases into pitches–these are your motives!
    1. Find the key phrase within the clip. This will take repeated listenings, and it’s great experience!
    2. Find pitches and rhythms that match your key phrases from the poem.
      1. Use the playback controls to listen carefully to each key phrase. You may need to play it syllable by syllable to find a pitch to go with it, but you don’t need to strive for perfection.
      2. Hold the command (Apple) key and double-click in the edit window to make a new note. Drag it up and down and listen to find the pitch you want. Drag it left and right so it lines up (pretty much) with the syllable you’re matching. Watch your new note move in the track window, so you can see it and the sound clip at the same time. You won’t be able to match each syllable exactly because you’re rounding to the nearest sixteenth note.
      3. Drag the ends of each note to adjust their durations to fit the sound clip.
  4. Draw your motives in paper. This will be a palette for your graphic score.
  5. Take another piece of paper, and consider one edge the beginning of the poem and the other edge the end of the poem.
    1. Label the sections or stages in the poem along the timeline (use words)
    2. Draw (using no words) significant events or images on the timeline
    3. Draw your motives on the score to make patterns that connect other ideas or fill in gaps. Think about having something high and something low most of the time. One can just be a background while the other is more active, they can trade off, or they could move together as one. Stretch or extend your motives vertically or horizontally as needed. If there were any repeated phrases or opposites in the text, consider depicting them in a similar way.
  6. Now mute unneeded tracks and draw your score into a piano roll view. Aim to have the first, last, or highest notes on downbeats.
    1. Place the pitch and rhythm first,
    2. then select them all and drag the end of one note to make them all legato, sustained, or staccato.
    3. Adjust the ends of individual notes (to be longer or shorter than the rest) to make them stand out.
  7. Play it and listen to see if the mood of the poem and the structure of your graph come across to your ears. Does any part go by too quickly or take too long? Is any part too busy or sparse? Go back and make adjustments.
  8. Listen again; do any pitches clash or stick out where you don’t want them to? Try switching to staff view and adjusting them by dragging them up or downward. Try changing notes with accidentals to notes without them.

Sample Work

Poem: “Sunrise” by David Austin

What kind of movement or change is in the poem? It moves from night to dawn.

Find a few phrases that are significant in the poem.

  • night
  • becomes morning
  • the sky turns blue
  • something we call dawn

What are the most significant events or vivid images presented in the poem?

  • little glow of orange
  • birds begin to fly
  • kitchen lights come on

After entering the score and listening to it, what do yo want to fix?

  • Opening “night” should be longer, more peaceful
  • “Little glow of orange” does not stand out: make “becomes morning” motive get faster, leave a rest before it, and put it in a different register
  • “Little glow of orange” does not sound like it’s growing: make it grow faster
  • Rest before final “something we call dawn” doesn’t sound right–it shouldn’t stop. Make the note before it long instead.

Other Activities to Consider

  • You can give students partially started projects to save time. Just do some of the earlier steps yourself and have students build upon that file.
  • Have students write their own poems, and record them into GarageBand. Try subjects that involve vividly describing feelings or moments.
  • Print the staff view of the composition, let students write style markings, articulations, dynamics, pedal indications, etc. on it, and have someone perform the projects live with expression. You may need to adjust the composition some to make it easier to play.

How To Make a Starter File

  1. Run GarageBand
  2. Make a new project (the default key of C and tempo of 120bpm are fine…here)
  3. Drag the poem recording into the track area. It will make a new audio (”Real Instrument”) track with the recorded poem on it.
  4. Drag the poem to the beginning of the timeline (all the way to the left).
  5. Set the grid to sixteenth notes by clicking the ruler in the corner of the edit window and selecting sixteenth notes.
  6. In the Edit window, switch to staff view, and set quantization to sixteenth notes (it defaults to eighth notes).
  7. Drag a blank MIDI file into the track window twice (to make two new MIDI tracks).
  8. Drag the bottom left corners of each MIDI region to increase their length to several measures.
  9. Save the file!

GarageBand Tutorials

Completely Free

From Apple

From Others

  • GarageBand 3 Hot tips from Apple
  • GarageBand Master blog with tips and tricks, in and out of GarageBand (including recording techniques)
  • A walkthrough at Electronic Musician magazine online
  • Tips on making a song in GarageBand at Synthtopia
  • Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) at The Garage Door — for tutorials, select a topic in the “All about…” menu on that page
  • As always, more through Google

Partially Free

Free Software Worth Looking At

June 11th, 2008