Music Composition DUMmIES

Tuba” by Paul Tripp and George Keinsinger. In this composition, several

instruments take on personalities as the Tuba seeks something more

melodically expressive than the usual oom-pah, oom-pah.

You don’t have to be as direct and literal as Prokofiev or Tripp-Keisinger with

your characterizations, but you can definitely choose specific instruments to

convey moods, have dialogs, create contrast, and generally tell an emotional

story. The story doesn’t need to have specific characters attached to definite

instruments.

When writing for multiple voices, whether you are telling a specific story or

being totally abstract, you are always establishing and developing relation-

ships within your music. Just as in a conversation, multiple melodic voices

in a musical composition can represent different forces in your music. For

example, you could assign each of the following things to different instru-

ments:

Agreement

Discourse

Argument

Playfulness

Conflict

Confusion

Chaos

A storyline can form in the imagination of each listener. You don’t have to

provide anything but the music.

Writing Multiple Harmony Lines ...............................................................

One way to get two or more voices to work together is to keep them harmoni-

cally and rhythmically aligned. This technique is called parallel harmony, but

that term can be deceptive. There are times when voices harmonized in par-

allel do not exactly move together in perfectly synchronized motion. The

idea, rather, is to stay within the tonality of the piece and observe the same

rhythmic phrasing without the parts running across each other, away from

each other, or towards each other.

Notice how the last three notes in the second part of Figure 16-1 don’t move

parallel to the first part. If they did, we would lose the tonal relationship

between the two parts.

198 Part IV: Orchestration and Arrangement