This composition started out as another Music Theory composition project, this time focused on writing a song in the 32-bar American Song Form (AABA).

I began by just outlining a melody with no text in mind. I really liked the feel and sense of momentum in a previous arrangement, which was in 3/4 time, so I decided to run with that.

Even from the start it felt like the 8 bar lines were too long to work with, so I concentrated on 4 bar subphrases while keeping the overall 32-bar form in mind.

Since I usually default to minor key, I decided to force myself into major, starting in C and then eventually transposing to F once the boundaries of the melody were established.

Once I had the A and B phrases laid out, I added some basic harmonization. I tried to add some variety to the three repeats of the A phrase by changing the harmonic progression, altering the cadences, and adding some secondary dominants.

In the version I made for class, I just created a simple accompaniment, switching up the pattern a little for the B phrases. Here is the final result:

Since that totally sounds like a hymn, I decided that it needed some text. After working through the rhythms, I realized that what I had written fit a standard 87 87 D hymn text pretty well.

A quick internet search led me to hymnswithoutwords.com, where I found several workable texts. The one I eventually chose was “Lord Thy Church on Earth Is Seeking” by Hugh Braham Sherlock.

The tune actually seemed pretty catchy to me, so I figured it would be interesting to apply my voice leading knowledge and create a 4-part arrangement.

After putting together my first pass, I realized the basses were spending too much time in the basement, so I transposed again up to G major which balanced out the voices a bit better.

Final verdict: I actually like this hymn quite a lot! I think all the parts are interesting to sing and the text really works well. Hopefully someday I can convince our choir director to use it.

The origin of this one came from a conversation I had with my wife about how there were tons of songs about Mary but almost nothing about Joseph. We came up with a couple: Joseph Dearest, Joseph Mine obviously, and The Cherry Tree Carol. But not really much else.

Then she mentioned that she had written a poem a while back about Joseph, and I thought maybe I could work it into a composition.

The poem is essentially about the idea that the physical reality of holding the newborn baby Jesus broke through all the fears and doubts that Mary and Joseph had been experiencing and brought them together in love. I mean, you have to admit it must have been pretty a socially awkward nine months.

So I really liked the content of the poem, but when viewed as a potential subject for composition, it had its share of challenges:

1. Utterly unstructured. My wife writes most of her poetry in free verse, so there was really nothing that I could latch onto.
2. Short. It’s not a very long poem at all — a sum total of less than 100 words, in three sentences.

So I let it ruminate for a while in my head, not sure what to do until one day I got my “hook.” The poem as written is in the third person. But what if I did it as a duet, with one voice taking on the role of Mary, and the other taking on the role of Joseph? At the end of the poem, the voices would unify and end together.

To make it work, I had to convert all instances of he/him/his/she/her to I/me/my in one voice, while leaving the other voice as-is. Clearly this meant that the text of the two voices had to diverge. For example, the opening line starts:

As he laid the baby tenderly in her arms

When the woman’s voice (Mary) sings that, it becomes “As he laid the baby tenderly in my arms.” And the text from Joseph’s perspective becomes “As I laid the baby tenderly in her arms.”

Of course, this creates clashing text, so my plan was to ensure that the two voices separated at the divergence points to avoid the clashing.

I started with the upper melody (Mary) and just came up with something that I felt was reasonable. Then I wrote harmonizing chords underneath the melody, and wrote the lower melody with those chords in mind.

I also tried to do a little bit of painting with the music, in order to emphasize some of the emotions. The whole piece has a bit of a somber feel to it, starting in F minor and eventually moving to B-flat minor, with a few odd chords thrown in.

So how did it turn out? Judge for yourself (sans words):

From my perspective, the short answer is: Eh. The lack of structure—and the fact that I didn’t try to artificially create structure on top of it—meant that the end result was kind of meandering.

If I had to do it over (and I may eventually), I would probably figure out a few places to incorporate some kind of unifying motive and ensure the whole thing held together better.

Woohoo! My first original composition.

It started off as a composition project for my Music Theory class, which meant that it had some constraints on it. I’m not yet sure whether working under constraints is good or bad, but in this case I think it worked out well.

The requirements were pretty simple:

• Any key or time signature was allowed.
• Length of the piece should be 16 bars.
• Provide melody and bass line (no inner voices).
• Had to include at least one of each non-chord tone type (passing tone, neighbor tone, escape tone, appogiatura, free tone, anticipation, suspension, etc.)
• Had to provide several standard cadence points.
• Had to end on a perfect authentic cadence.

The first step was to pick out some text to use that would fit in a 16 bar form. The traditional “Holy, Holy” text from church jumped out, since I sing it every Sunday:

Holy, Holy, Holy Lord,
God of power and might,
Heaven and earth are fully of your Glory,
Hosanna in the highest.
Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord,
Hosanna in the highest.

The first tricky bit was making sure all that text would fit in just 16 bars, so I decided on a 12/8 meter which gave me enough beats to work with. Also, I decided to repeat the first “Holy, Holy, Holy” line in order to end up with 4 roughly even lines to fit into 16 bars.

Since I truly adore minor key music, I of course chose a minor key. I started with F minor, but as my melody developed, I needed some headroom so I moved it down to C minor.

Having never started from scratch before, I decided to begin with a chord progression and then try to fit a melody into that. Actually, I began even earlier by laying out cadences for each 4 measure phrase, and then developing a progression for each line that led up to the cadence.

Once I’d laid something out, I wrote out a basic melody that fit the text. Given that it was in compound meter, I chose a basic 2:1 pattern for the melody line, which gives it a bit of a lilt.

Since I chose to repeat the first line, it seemed most natural to apply an AABB pattern to the music. The first two lines (AA) open the same, but the second line alternately rides a step higher or lower to keep things interesting. The second two lines (BB) follow a similar pattern except the second of the pair jumps up a third.

Once the melody was in place, I had to come up with a bass line to support it harmonically. After some fiddling, I came up with a bass part for the first two lines (AA) that provided momentum in spaces where the melody paused, and paused where the melody moved.

For the second two lines (BB), I was unsure what to do, so I started to experiment with an arpeggiated bass line. Once I did that, it immediately felt like the whole bass line was meant to be written for cello, so I locked in on that.

After a quick consult with my instructor, I realized I was relying too much on second inversion chords, and that my cadences were not all landing in root position. At first I resisted changing things, but soon found that it didn’t take a lot of twiddling to make things line up, and the end result was pretty pleasing:

Overall, I didn’t have any significant instances where the requirements pushed me into doing something awkward. The one minor situation was the introduction of a free tone in the last line, which I eventually moved back to a chord tone, which sounded a bit more natural.

Once it was turned in, I had the opportunity to share my work with a small group of composers I had recently met, and they offered me some minor suggestions for improvement beyond what was in class. The most important item was the lack of momentum at the end of the first two phrases, which I rectified by adding a descending line to the bass that led into the next phrase.

And here it is in its “final” form:

In the end, I’m quite happy with how this project turned out. Perhaps I’ll revisit the theme in the future and add a matching Fraction.

Interestingly, I did not first encounter this hymn tune in its original form. Instead, the music was set to a different text (“Mary Heard the Angel’s Blessing”) and published in Voices, Found, a supplemental hymnal that focuses on texts written by women.

I gravitated to this piece because we elected to sing it in Advent, and it was in a minor key. Personally, I love minor key Advent/Christmas music, and also really loved the 3/4 lilt of this relatively simple tune.

Much like my previous arrangement, I was afforded the luxury of an existing harmonization. As written, the tune has a melody line and a fairly basic piano/organ accompaniment that included a few small bits of ornamentation. Here it is in its original form:

I did feel it necessary to bump the composition up a half step, from E minor to F minor. Giving the sopranos a low B to sing seemed unnecessary when there was still some headroom in the upper registers.

I started off with just a simple SATB arrangement, incorporating the chord tones into the lower voices and using voice leading to smooth out the lines. I retained almost all of the ornamentation that was present in the original instrumental part to keep it interesting. Here’s how it ended up:

After that, I decided to add a descant line. To date, I haven’t found a text for this tune that really calls out for a descant, but I did want to try making one anyway. Adding this was kind of fun, trying to soar a bit above the soprano line while adding some sparkle. In one section I do allow the descant to dip briefly below the melody:

Having done the voice leading, I was unsure whether to keep it unaccompanied or add back the accompaniment. In the end I compromised, and put an extremely simple accompaniment back in that could easily be dropped:

Looking back at my work a few months (and classes) later, I see that I did make quite a number of errors: several parallel 5ths and octaves, overuse of the second inversion, etc.

To address this, I have worked up an alternate SATB arrangement that adheres to more of the standard rules. I’ll post a follow-up to this entry once it is complete.

So in the time leading up to Advent this year, we were handed this simple piece to sing as our gospel acclimation (if you visit the link above, you can download the lead sheet, at least as of the time of this post). I think the idea was to choose something that both our choir and our praise band could sing, to create continuity between two services that typically have vastly different music.

Here is the piece in its original form, with the melody played on violin and a simple chordal accompaniment on piano:

From the outset, there were two things that bugged me about the original work. The first was the range, which sits at the bottom of the soprano/tenor tessitura. Given that the range of the entire piece only covers a fifth, it could have easily been transposed a few steps higher and not stressed out anyone.

And second thing I thought the work was missing was, of course, harmonization.

I began the process by taking care of the first issue first, bumping the whole thing up a perfect fourth, from C major to F major. This moved the melody line in the soprano high enough to leave room for other voices.

Conveniently, the original lead sheet provided the chords, so I didn’t have to develop my own harmonic structure. Of course, adhering to the provided harmony was more constraining and presented its own challenges.

One of the interesting considerations involved is that the melody line frequently anticipates the chord change. This meant I needed to decide whether some or all of the other voices should do the same, or whether they should directly follow the provided harmonic rhythm. After some experimentation, I decided to stick close to the provided chords and leave the melody contrasting.

Since the song is fundamentally pretty simple, I also decided to keep to a strict chorale style harmonization, maintaining the same rhythm in all four voices.

I was really flying by the seat of my pants to begin with, as we hadn’t even gotten to studying non-chord tones or basic voice leading by the time I did my first version. So I was pretty much just applying my choral experience to make it sound good and stay within the provided chords. Here’s how it turned out:

After completing the first draft, I ran it by a composer friend in the choir, who offered some helpful suggestions. I set it aside for a while, but then updated/tweaked it again when getting it ready for this post. Having some basic voice leading under my belt made clear some of the basic errors I’d made. Here is an updated version:

Fundamentally, however, it hasn’t changed too significantly from my first try. For a first arrangement, I’m happy to say that I’m not too embarrassed!

When I signed up for my Music Theory class last summer, I knew I wanted a few basic things out of it: to improve my sight singing; to do some formal interval and dictation training; and to gain a better understanding of the structure of the music I’ve been singing.

Now, after two quarters, I’ve found that: sight singing is coming along nicely (though I really hate Solfège); interval training is kicking my rear (dictation is going ok); and, as it turns out, I am totally loving the study and analysis of music structure.

This naturally led me to seriously consider composing something of my own.

As the class advanced through melodic and harmonic analysis, I felt like I was quickly gaining just enough knowledge to be dangerous. In November at church we received a unison hymn with chords and I thought, Surely I can harmonize this.

I know very well that I still have a lot yet to learn. But if there’s one thing I discovered when teaching myself programming, it’s that diving in and doing something is the best way to work through it and force yourself to fill in the gaps in whatever way you can.

Thus, I set myself a goal of doing some sort of composition each month. It’s March now, but I started on this back in December. And with a few months under my belt, I’m feeling like this is actually an achievable goal.

Beyond just writing the music, I also feel like the process of working through it afterwards (a “postmortem” of sorts) is valuable to reinforcing my education. So in addition to producing a composition each month, I intend to write about it as well on this blog.

Depending on the particulars and how well I think it turned out, I may or may not share fine details. But I think it will be instructive to at least talk it through. Expect a few “catch up” posts to cover December through February, followed by hopefully monthly musings on my latest attempts.

Thanks for listening!