When JC invited me to publish something in this blog, it took me quite a while to figure out what to write about that would be interesting for a forum visited by many colleagues who already have their own voice as composers, and decided that maybe (just maybe) the most interesting thing I could share is my own methodology and approach, being that my musical background is (for good and for bad) far from that of musicians who have studied and developed their language inside the usual jazz boundaries. I got into music through long years of classical piano and composition as well as studies in counterpoint, orchestration, etc. When jazz harmony and piano blew my mind at around 17, I had already developed a deep interest for longer forms and the eternal problem of finding the right amount of variation of all the possible elements and enough motif development so that the piece will move forward and stay interesting, but not so much that it could end up being a collage of so many ideas that would conspire against unity and coherence. I guess that many of our first compositions suffer from that all-you-can-tell-in-5-minutes syndrome, right? Through studying with different teachers (and most importantly with the Argentine Gabriel Senanes) I’ve developed a certain protocol that I try to use almost always, sometimes more rigorously than others, which is based on a non-formal approach to the piece, that is, you do not write in order. Again, we are not talking of a 32-bar song here (in which case you certainly might want to write bar 5 before you meet bar 6) but of more complex, ambitious forms. There is, of course the exception of you being a W.A. Mozart-type (who according to the legend could write the whole piece from beginning to end, in ink, including the orchestration). If this is your case, please go back to Netflix, you certainly will get nothing out of this article, but if you are (as yours truly) a mortal, average composer with some good ideas once in a while which need a lot of deep thought and work until they become a final piece, then you might want to read on and consider adding any of these concepts to your inventing routines. First of all, eureka, we have an IDEA. That can be anything at all: a melody, a chord progression, just a rhythm, or even a form…anything that you use as a starting point. (You are looking at a pyramid in Egypt, and decide you will write a piece: you have no pitch, no time yet, nothing, but you have a frame: a big triangle, climax exactly at 50% of the piece…is it a palindrome? Does the peak in the middle represent pitch? Or orchestral density? Your call, it is YOUR pyramid now, nobody else’s!) Ideas tend to be short, and volatile: make a note! Any piece of paper will do, and you add one more to your archive of ideas, normally an old box or folder full of forgotten and torn pieces of paper. For mysterious reasons, some of those papers keep lingering in your mind with enough persistence so that you will grab that one from 4/11/19 and put it in the piano stand. Let’s say you have a collection of pitches (a melody germ), then you are missing all the other elements (which is the harmony? which is the rhythm? who plays it?) and, yes,…some more length (4 bars is too short even for our Instagram-can’t-focus-on-anything brains). Sing out the melody a few times, see if it reveals more clues about where she wants to go (sorry for the “she” here, melody is feminine in Spanish. And it is too important to call it “it”, you feel me?) Maybe you moved to 8 bars, maybe still only 4…no worries, you’ve just completed the first segment of the compositional trip, this one was short and easy: just “downloading” the idea from…from…wish we knew, right!? Or maybe we do not want to know, like we do not want to know how the magician produced that pigeon out of the empty hat. A personal word about the IDEA: while some composers talk about creating a motif out of nothing, just grabbing four pitches at random for example, and while I swear I respect any approach to the creative act you might choose (like my friend Ignacio who combines his pink shoes with a yellow tie and likes it), I personally could never write any good music out of such a start, other than maybe some school exercise. Can you cook with whatever is left in the fridge? Sure thing, but I doubt you can compare that meal to the one that started with you in Ironbound, NJ, and suddenly realizing you are close to Seabras, the Portuguese supermarket, where they sell the real North Atlantic octopus with which you could…etc.) You might argue: the things you had in the fridge were also great quality ingredients, then, why the difference? Well, this is the difference: the second menu was born out of an idea that came NATURALLY to you…and who knows why those ideas’ genetic material is so much richer, personal and other good things! Let’s go for a glass of wine and dive into this, your treat! So, what now? By now the notes have tentative durations (never final, just for now!) Time to harmonize maybe? If an initial harmony was part of the combo, I write it down on top of the melody, if not, I go for the most obvious one or one that sounds instantly good, trying not think too much, it is not yet time for corrections! We are about to embark in the second segment of our composing trip: ACCUMULATION. We do not praise, we do not judge, we do not reject, we do not choose or make any decision: we accumulate possibilities, not knowing where, when or if they will be used at all, and we …
