Welcome to the fourth instalment of my series on getting your composition career off the ground. In my previous post, I warned of a long delay... I wasn't, however, expecting a two year delay! Today we're discussing orchestration; that is, the art of putting sound together within the context of multiple sounds. This is, after learning the building blocks of melody and harmony and form, the most complex issue of composition. As always, we'll start by defining a few resources f

Apologies for the awkward title... I've been doing a bit of GRE review and I'm up to my ears in analogies and test techniques. Which means that my head is spinning from all the useless garbage I'm having to put into it. If you know me at all, you know my loathing for the overpriced exercise in futility that is standardized tests. I have an analogy for you, ETS: The GRE is to Useful Things as squashing is to water. I digress. This post is the third in my series on getting your

An apt definition for music, no? If you think about it, it really does cover just about anything you can consider music. Organizing is key and that's what we're talking about today: organizing your music. We're discussing the basics of form and how it works. This is part two of my introduction to composition series, all about the foundations of the main musical forms with some relevant examples. This post is not about analyzing form (though I will give you some resources for

When I tell people I'm a composer the usual response is something along the lines of "Oh, I could never do that!" I'm often asked by musicians who are interested in composing how I do it and, more to the point, how they can do it. I can tell you what I do, how I do it, and the skills I developed over time that allow me to compose. But you are the one who is ultimately going to have to make it happen. This is the first in a series of posts on the foundational concepts of compo

Since I'm a composer, it shouldn't surprise you that I think about music a lot. Maybe even constantly. (Definitely constantly.) My mum often says that I have a one-track mind... and that track is whatever music I'm writing on that given day. One of the things I think about the most is how to construct interesting music that gets its message across clearly to the listener. If someone listens to something you've written and they walk away with it stuck in their head, you know y