slowly wringing them out emotionally while moving to your musical climax,
potentially exhausting them with the sheer effort of moving to the end of the
song or the section of music.Think Holst, Bartok, Legendary Pink Dots, The Swans, Throbbing Gristle,
Popol Vuh, and Godspeed You Black Emperor.Shaping story and mood by combining effort shapes...................
Your composition tells a story. Using effort shapes, you can decide on the
moods of your story and the order in which you want to present them, and
then you can write heavy, light, direct, indirect, and so on to get the moods
across to the listener. You can use a change of effort shape to develop or
restate a motif or melodic phrase.Just as there are a lot of ways to say, “I love you,” there are also many ways to
present any melodic idea. A single phrase can be arranged to sound sus-
tained or staccato. You can take any musical idea and frame it into an effort
shape with surprisingly little difficulty using choices of orchestration, tempo,
the octave in which the melody is played, or almost anything else you like.
The effort shapes just give you handy, pre-packaged combinations of ingredi-
ents to get your message across.A good way to get a grasp on composition is to listen for these effort shapes
in the music of others. They are everywhere. Although composers don’t often
use them consciously, it is difficult to find a single moment in music that can’t
be assigned one or more effort shapes. Most musical compositions move
back and forth between a couple different effort shapes. Some music stays
pretty much on a single one. And some compositions run almost the entire
gamut of them. This is true for tonal music, atonal music, popular, hip-hop,
jazz, metal, classical, and so on. Some genres of music are almost entirely
characterized by single effort shapes. There is a good deal of Punch and Dab
in hip-hop, a lot of Slash in metal, and Press in rock and roll. Jazz uses a lot of
Glide, Float, and Flick energy.Consider Gustav Holst’s The Planets (op. 32). To follow along, you may have
to go out and get a recording of this orchestral suite. But if you don’t have it
already, you should anyway. Elsewhere is this book we have mentioned that
many modern film composers seem to have been influenced by this composi-
tion. Maybe a reason for its influence is that Holst moves us through so many
different moods — or effort shapes.Chapter 11: Composing from the Void 133
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