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How Not
to Write a Musical
Some years ago, I had the
misfortune to offer my services to a lady who had
written a musical. This had apparently been her hobby
for some years, and it would have been a perfectly
harmless pastime except that she wanted it to be
performed, which meant that there were going to be
musicians involved who would have to decode her
instructions and somehow bring this voluminous
enterprise to life. I seem to recall she was in her
eighties, and had spent most of her life writing what
she called her 'baby.' She therefore did not seem
interesting in hearing any suggestions, most of which
were of a purely technical variety on my part, though
if I had been honest I would have suggested quite a
bit of rewriting as well. The musical had at
least been printed on a popular computer scoring
program so it was legible, but there were so many
things that made it awkward and nearly impossible to
execute (not because it was hard to play but because
so much of it did not make sense; the musical
equivalent of spelling errors and poor syntax
throughout made for very rough sledding). In a
few cases during rehearsals, when trying to deal with
several of these problems at once made me ready to
spit nails, I tried very politely to explain a few of
these concepts to her, but they did not take root for
whatever reason, and, since I did not want to crush
her ego, I kept quiet about most of it. Eventually,
after struggling over the issue, I decided that
nothing useful would come from offering to help her
"revise" her score, (which I'm sure she didn't think
was in any way necessary) but the teacher in me would
still like to do whatever is possible to prevent
something like this from happening to anyone else who
would like to avoid it.
Therefore, consider this
the Marley's ghost of compositional advice--please, for
the love of Pete, if you are writing something that you
want people to perform, consider the following items.
They are not here to ruin your inspiration, merely to
keep the musicians around you from losing their sanity.
Most of them seem like common sense. However, when you
are writing a large and complex musical work, there are
an astonishing number of things that you can do wrong.
Since this lady did practically all of them, I have it
in my power to warn you against making the same
mistakes.
There are many people who
have the quaint idea that a composer is someone who
works in solitude on in a mountain villa by an open
window, blissfully being bombarded with musical ideas
like neutrinos and simply writing them down without any
need for second-guessing anything. No technical
knowledge is required; anything learned can only get in
the way of a good inspiration. These people's patron
saint is Mozart, who may have actually come the closest
to really composing in this manner, except for the small
fact that he had a teacher-composer father who gave
young Mozart all kinds of technical instruction from the
age of three, and who took Mozart all over Europe,
admittedly showing him off before astonished royalty
(astonishing royalty is not as hard to do as you might
think), but also giving Mozart exposure to the best
minds on the continent so that before he was very old he
knew a lot of stuff about music. This, and the fact
that, while many of his papers were destroyed, there are
also plenty of sketches and unfinished compositions that
show that Mozart didn't just take dictation from heaven
and never change his mind about anything. He learned, he
tried, he failed, he assimilated, he thought about how
to write music constantly.
Now, the history of music
is also filled with narrow-minded pedants who liked to
tell composers that their most audacious and
ground-breaking ideas simply would not do at all, and
like to pour cold water on their best inspirations. But
every undergraduate theory student who gets his or her
compositional assignment corrected by a teacher is
liable to put themselves in such a grandiose position
too, so you see how that philosophy can be taken too
far.
Basically, anybody who
really wants to be a composer ought to get some kind of
training; you can always decide later which advice to
heed and which to ignore. Just because you know how to
do something doesn't mean you have to do it that way,
but not knowing in the first place means you are greatly
limited; for example to the three chords that this lady
was using. If she had known how to use them properly she
might have kept us entertained. There is, after all,
some charm in simplicity. But then, there is what I call
simplicity by choice and simplicity by default. The
first kind is some of the most beautiful music in the
world. When a great genius in music, who could write a
lengthy 6-voice fugue chooses instead to write a simple
melody, the effect is often astonishing. But the second
kind of simplicity is asking for trouble--when a chord
or a turn of phrase is the only one the composer has in
his or her imagination, even though it doesn't fit very
well. Maybe some of your notes don't get along with the
others.
It is not necessary to
obtain a license to compose music--most means of
expression, artistic or otherwise, are about as
unregulated as the food supplements industry. And since
you are entitled to "lose 50 lbs fast!" simply by
swallowing some tasty pills, you might as well be
entitled to command certain sounds to arrange themselves
in a certain order without bothering yourself about
whether there is a better or worse way to do it.
It is inspiration, after all. Which, when you think
about it, is a lot like opinions. You can arrive at them
however you like.
There are, in the course
of any kind of composition, any number of decisions in
which judgment and taste play a role. But most of the
suggestions below are of a purely practical nature. It
generally does not mess with a novelist's artistic
vision if his publisher numbers the pages. Most people
consider it helpful to be able to find page 336 when
they want to. It is the same in music.
I'll begin with the most
technical, detailed explanation and work outward. You
can skip it if you are not in the mood for music theory
right at the moment.
First of all, listen to your
performers. If they are having trouble singing something
you have written, it might be because they are poor
singers; on the other hand, perhaps what you have
written is awkward. If they are forever instinctively
changing one note, that may be because the phrase is
much smoother that way. Let me submit the following for
your consideration:
The first phrase
represents how everyone is singing your tune; the second
is how it was written. However, the second way contains
a few problems. The first is that there is an odd
interval called a
tri-tone between the second and third note, which is
hard to sing. Not impossible--it can even be used
effectively, for example in Bernstein's West Side Story
when Tony sings of his new found love Maria on these
notes:
The tri-tone was once
called "the devil in music" which I take as a sign that
early music theorists didn't care for it a lot.
Just to show why
things like these take a bit of discussion with a
person who knows what they are talking about--Your
first
phrase has the same three notes at the beginning, and
the matter turns out very differently. This is because
what is really going on here is that we are singing
two things at once, known as a "compound line." The
first and third notes are leading us up to the final
note, the
door prize
(disclaimer: not an actual musical term), and the
second and fourth are as well. Well, sort of. What the
second line needs to do, not-obviously-enough, is
establish the "dominant" harmony, which is always five
notes up from the key of the piece, in this case D.
That would make our dominant pitch an A. This dominant
harmony functions as a kind of harmonic glue to get us
to our "door prize" harmony. You've heard this formula
millions of times in your lifetime whether you know it
or not. It became, for about 300 years,
the
harmonic pattern our ears were itching to hear. Three
centuries is a pretty long time for a fad, if indeed
that is all it was. And we're still not over it.
Interestingly enough, this
dominant harmony, in the key of D Major, contains the
notes A, C# and E. C# is particularly important because
it is the tone that leads the ear the conclude on the
note D. But in the first example, the C# doesn't go
where it ought to. It is false advertising. It goes in
the wrong direction, and it suggests the wrong harmony.
This is not a good time to introduce a note belonging to
a sub-dominant chord; if you wrote an essay for English
class in which you discussed the need for aid to Africa,
and in the last paragraph decided to talk about the
Cubs' game last night, your teacher would not think this
was a stroke of brilliance on your part. True, there was
a musical phenomena, called a "Landini cadence" in which
the leading tone always gave way to the very same
extraneous note we've got going on above, before
concluding on the keynote, which is guaranteed to drive
the modern ear mad, but that went out of style about 700
years ago.
Then why does it work if
it goes down to an A instead of a B? Because the harmony
doesn't change. Since it is still part of the dominant
harmony, the ear hears two complimentary things going on
here, instead of one unfocused, disjointed thing.
Most singers could
probably not explain this phenomenon, but, at our
rehearsals, I noticed that they all changed the note B
to an A instinctively, which shows you how sometimes a
technical explanation can be avoided if your ear knows
what to do. What is interesting about the two
examples is that, while they both contain tri-tones, the
second version makes it obvious, whereas in the first,
you don't notice. If I furnished the left hand, you
would also notice a nasty disagreement between the
harmony and the melody. What is also interesting is that
everybody in that room seemed to know what was musically
natural except the composer!
Being able to explain why
something works in words and concepts helps in ways
that, alas, might take some explanation. Some people are
quite against any explaining, and if they really can
manage the same results purely by instinct they have my
blessing. But it is rare that a good composer did not
consider that his work involved craftsmanship, and it is
just as rare for the people who have no idea how to make
music themselves to think that it does.
If the above explanation
does not make any sense to you, you may wish to learn
some basic music theory. If you cannot honestly hear any
difference in the two examples above, you might think
about something besides composing, unless you are really
innovative and plan to avoid traditional harmony
altogether.
It is amazing how one note can make
such a difference. Since I have spent so much time
dissecting the matter, I'll spare you the hundreds of
other examples in this musical, which were considerably
more egregious, and could not have been fixed simply be
changing one note. When Peter Schaffer, in the movie
"Amadeus" has Salieri exclaim admiringly "Change one
note [of Mozart's] and the piece is diminished." he
isn't just blowing smoke. This is probably the kind of
thing the kept Chopin up nights.
There are standard rules
that people generally follow when they are writing
words. One is being able to spell them properly. There
is an agreed upon spelling of most words (maybe two). If
you don't feel bound to this you may cause people
reading your work to spend more time trying to decode
your writing then they would like. There are similar
rules in music.
Technically an A-flat and
a G-sharp are the same note--at least on a piano (a
string player may have other ideas). This gives rise to
what we call enharmonic spellings, the choice of whether
to refer a the note between the G and the A as A-flat or
G-sharp, for example. Just like in English, we can't
spell everything however we feel like it, even if it
technically works. For instance, even though the "gh" is
silent in the word light, that doesn't give you license
to spell everything with a silent gh in the middle.
There are similar rules regarding how to spell chords
and melodies, and they are largely based on the function
those notes have in the overall context. If you
are in the key of A-minor, for example, and you choose
to write every leading-tone as an A-flat, you will drive
your pianist up a wall. He will be expecting that A-flat
to lead down to a G natural in the next measure, rather
than up to the A (which is what makes something a
leading tone--it leads the ear up to the key note--here
the note A). Twelve pages of this can make your pianist
very cranky. It is not impossible to read music written
this way, it just takes a lot more painstaking effort,
with no hints as to the music's overall construction.
knot beeing abull 2 speghl
propirlee leeds two alll kiends uv airers thatgh wil mac
yor pees vairy hrd too reid?
There was a point where
the harmony in this musical was so weird I had no idea
which notes to assume were misprints because the
composer's grasp of standard rules of this sort
(including which key signatures to use when) was so
sketchy I could not deduce what the outline of the
musical thought was. Key-signatures also have standard
spellings, and they point out the overall plan and
tendencies of the notes to go in various directions; in
other words governing the behavior of the notes, priming
our ears for what is typically expected and what is a
surprise. A surprise is very difficult to carry off
unless there is some kind of expectation. These key
signatures are part of an overall system and are not as
complicated as multiplication tables; elementary school
students could learn them all, if music teachers would
make the attempt.
The remaining points all
deal with practical matters related to performance.
If you are determined to
make an effect, you will naturally want to employ a
small orchestra. The first thing you can do for their
conductor is not to hide them somewhere that it is
impossible to see the stage and the singers. Every
amateur I've worked with in a musical is convinced that
singers do not need to see the conductor, because in
movies the music just comes out of nowhere and is
perfectly attuned to when the singer opens her mouth. In
the theater there is a guy in the pit, hidden away as
usual, because nobody wants to imagine that there is any
calculated effort involved in the magic of the theater,
but visible to the singers and the instrumentalists. He
is there because 20 people with their own opinion about
when the piece ought to begin is not a great idea. Try
getting 20 people to agree on what to have on their
pizza and you'll see what I mean. That conductor has to
coordinate everything--he literally makes the beat
visible to everyone, so that they can see exactly when
it is time to begin, where the next beat follows, and
how to play a particular passage by whether his motions
are fluid or vehement. Therefore, it is helpful if you
do not position your orchestra so that it is impossible
for the singers to see your conductor. That is not why
large pillars were created.
The next thing you can do
for your conductor is to give him a score. The
"full-score" is a copy of the music in which you can see
what all the instruments are playing. It is organized so
that all of the instrumental lines are joined together
and, though it is written left to right, a single line
of music may be as tall as the page itself, if there are
enough instruments all playing that line together, each
on its own "staff." Since one of the functions of the
conductor is to "cue" each instrument when it is time
for them to resume playing after a break (for security
reasons, partly, since the clarinetist should be able to
keep his own place) it would be helpful if the conductor
knew when the clarinet was actually supposed to begin
playing.
Another thing that is just
a bit helpful at rehearsals is to number your measures.
If the conductor asks you to do this several times, take
him seriously. What he is trying to avoid is the
situation wherein the aforementioned clarinetist appears
to have come in too early and is obviously in the wrong
spot in the music. If this happens, oh, I don't, know,
let's say five minutes into a seven minute piece, the
options are as follows: go back to the very beginning of
the piece and start over, confident in the knowledge
that, five minutes later, the same thing will happen,
probably because the clarinet part has been written
incorrectly (i.e., the wrong number of measures of rest
has been given), or, tell everybody to start at measure
310, which is only a few measures before the problem
spot occurred, so you can fix the problem in a
reasonable amount of time. If you had a full score, with
numbered measures, you would know what was supposed to
be going on--otherwise you will simply have to rely on
your ear and your intuition.
Now, as it happens, most
music writing software programs, like Finale,
automatically number measures. It seems you would have
to intentionally turn them off. This would be an
indication of unfathomably poor judgment.
If you are writing for
instruments, it is not necessary that they should all be
playing all the time. Judicious use of them is a
hallmark of good orchestration. This does not mean that
the best thing to do is to save the instruments until
you have reached the spot where the tempo is about to
change radically, and the singers, having arrived at a
rapturous climax, are preparing to make the audience's
dreary lives worthwhile by hanging out on a high C while
those of a less operatic inclination use this time to go
out and feed the meter without missing anything. When
the tempo is being altered and the opportunity is
therefore much greater for a sloppy and glorious
train-wreck of instrumental imprecision, by all means,
throw every instrument you have into the mix, the better
to cover up the singers, and make certain that none but
the most stalwart tenor will bother with that high C
ever again. Once the music has resumed its normal,
predictable pace, you can let the piano navigate these
boring passages on its own. This way, you don't have to
write nearly as many notes.
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