Chapter 16
Chapter 16: Composing for Multiple Voices................................................................
In This Chapter
Telling stories through music
Writing parallel harmony parts
Dealing with independent voices
Dissecting the elements of musical tones
Going over some do’s and don’ts
Exercising your multiple voice composition
I
t’s not always enough to just write a good melody and have some chords
playing behind it as accompaniment. Sometimes you can create more
interest in a piece of music by having more than one sound moving in a
melodic fashion at one time.What we mean by this is that along with that flute melody and the harp arpeg-
gios behind it, you may feel inclined to add a melodic accompaniment from
some other instrument. Maybe it’s another flute, or it could be a vocal, a clar-
inet, or whatever works for you. This idea of multiple melodic voices opens
up a lot of creative territory and presents new challenges of its own.Story Lines and Instrumentation ..............................................................
One of the creative territories that you open up when considering more than
one melodic voice in your composition is the ability to use instrumental
choices as characterizations in your music. In his well-known orchestral com-
position, Peter and the Wolf, Sergei Prokofiev uses instruments to directly rep-
resent specific characters in his story. For example, the duck is an oboe, the
bird is a flute, the cat is a clarinet, and the wolf is three ominous-sounding
French horns.This use of specific instruments playing certain motifs to indicate certain ideas
and characters is fairly common. Another example of specific characteriza-
tions (sometimes called leitmotifs) is to be found in the song “Tubby the