Music Composition DUMmIES

In many cases, the very first set of chords or notes is the most important part

of the song. Your opening musical phrase is just like the opening phrase of a

good book or story, and you should strive to instantly suck your listener into

the song with a memorable opener.

Think of Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” Gioachino Rossini’s William Tell

Overture (as immortalized in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and in

The Lone Ranger), or Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. These all feature openers

that just about everyone in the Western world is familiar with. And although

it’s extremely rare for a musician or writer to put that kind of lasting punch

into a composition, it’s something to strive for when you write music and

lyrics.

Chord progressions............................................................................

Just playing around with chord progressions (see Chapter 10) can be enough

to build the basic foundation of a song and figure out how you’re musically

going to begin it, no matter what the genre. You can get a lot of good songs

started off from just sitting down at your instrument and doing four or five

bars of I-V-I chords over and over, as in C major, G major, C major or A major,

E major, A major.

Try sitting down and humming along with these chord progressions for

awhile and see if you can’t either come up with your own song or hear some-

one else’s very familiar song coming out.

The greatest compositions are often surprisingly simple in structure.

Middles ..........................................................................................................

It has been said that people remember the beginning and ending of your

song, but they forget all about the middle. Nevertheless, the middle is usually

the biggest part of a composition and deserves attention and development.

Just as in a work of written fiction, the middle is where you develop the state-

ment first presented in the beginning. If you present a problem in the lyrics,

such as in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in which the lead character laments that he’s

always “running errands, never free... this is not the life for me” (translated

from the Italian for your reading pleasure), then in the middle of the piece you

140 Part III: Harmony and Structure