On Songs

For me my portal into music is melody.  It starts with a fragment and I then let it grow on me until I like the melody that has come into being.  Mind you, sometime this can include going down some cul-de-sacs and starting over again!

So then I may land up with a melody that is say 20 - 30 bars long.  

What do you do with it?

A song seems the most natural answer.

Of course, you don't have any lyrics yet, if things happen this way.  So then you have to ponder and decide what this music is about, what feelings it expresses and how you might want to say it in words.  Then you have to fit them into the music.  All of this can be hard and also prone to errors and throwing away days of work can happen easily.

So songs seemed to me from my first efforts at composing to be a very good candidate for a composition, since a melody line on its own somehow is not enough to qualify as a composition?

The other way around, of course, is to take a text you like and find a way to add music to it.  I have done this as well and did an interesting one recently.  I could claim that what I do then is to sense the meaning of the text and somehow an obvious musical equivalence pops into my head, but the reality is a little more complicated.

I have not counted but guess that I have written 15 songs that I wanted to hang onto.  The current "batch" I have been working on over the last 6 months consists of 7 songs.

A while ago I read an interesting book on brain research and the scientists ran some tests to determine whether the music for a song was enough for a listener to know what the song was about.  The result was negative.  Yes, if a melody is in minor mode and slow it will engage different feelings than a march in major mode. A song I wrote with the lyrics as well a little while ago I gave the title "Will you be my friend?"  That idea came to me after I had found the melody and I liked it.  There is no way someone could guess from the music that this must be what this song has to be about.

I have taken the same fragment idea (for example the one which I called "The Happy Idea") and worked with it to create a song and also to write a trio and quartet with it.  I found it fascinating how for each "type" it was a completely different experience.  I hope to use two of the last songs I just wrote also for another quartet and will be interested to learn how that will turn out.

As an aside I wonder if composers of "Neue Musik" have much of an interest in writing songs. Schoenberg could be called the father of Neue Musik with its focus on atonality. 

I suspect it must be hard to "engineer" a song that you would like to hear.  By the way do you know what the term "Neue Musik" is in English?  New Music is the obvious translation, but I am not sure if they use that.  Mind you, possibly even in Germany the term "Neue Musik" only means something special to folks that have studied music in Germany or attend classical music concerts and read about it in the program?  I exercised Google and it came up with New Contemporary Classical Music but if you read what Wikipedia has to tell you about that topic, it covers a lot of ground indeed.  For me all great new songs during my life time (I am 77 as I write this) were always pop songs.  Have I lost my way somehow trying to write songs in a classical music style?

Sometimes ideas about the accompaniment come into being at the same time as the melody, but when I am focusing on getting a melody into being those ideas can easily get lost.  For me often this is the second step in writing a song, unless I also wrote the lyrics, which I would do as the second step usually.

When it comes to adding an accompaniment to a song I would love to spend time with a singing teacher to learn more about to what degree it is necessary to help the singer find the right note, i.e. how much support is needed for the singer?  Otherwise there are lots of possible areas where the accompaniment can make the song "look better", like rhythmic support, contrasts, embellishments and the like.  Sometimes it is hard to decide what is best.  For one of my last songs I am trying to make the cello sound a bit like wind rustling through trees.  Well, I am not sure that I succeeded but I had to try!  I hope to ask a cellist some time how this can be done better.

Another interesting "problem" for me is that since Sibelius and NotePerfomer can't really sing I use a flute for the sound of a soprano, for example.  The flute can "speak" for itself quite well against say a cello or piano but I wonder if for a soprano I would need to do more?  Hopefully one day I will learn this when I can find someone interested in playing some of my songs.

Of course, one can apply harmony to find the right "sound" to go with a note in the melody, including using dissonances to create the pressure intended to move to the next note.

I have found that if I try to "engineer" an accompaniment that way (and I have tried to do it many times and still discover myself falling into that trap today) the outcome is always no good.  Somehow it needs to be music to me as well and of course hopefully also sound as close as possible "good" on its own.  With a piano where you have 2 "voices" to add to the melody you can't develop two independent "melodies" to go with your song, of course.  So applying some "engineering" and seeing if it passes the sound test may be permissible?

All the songs I have written for me are of an intimate nature, like if someone wants to tell something to a friend.  They are not meant to be performed to a large audience, backed by a large orchestra where the singer can show that she has a powerful voice.

Wikipedia and other sources on the Internet give a range for a soprano up to a high A.  I have to admit that I have gone to a high B, a half tone higher on quite a few occasions. I would prefer to leave the songs the way they are but may have to modulate them down a bit to make it easier for the singer.   I won’t have to worry about that until a singer actually wants to sing any one of them. In chronological order here they are:

Blessed Are

It’s the little things

Will you be my friend?

Why, just why

A gentle breeze

Tree of love

Morning Glory

Let me tell you a bit about them:

Apart from the last one all of them have a close “relative” in the form of an instrumental piece.

Blessed Are

The first song “Blessed Are” is a variation on the piano and flute piece “In Devotion”.  The first section of that piece I first wrote for the piano only because I was annoyed at the way that teachers at the university were treating cadences as if they were not music.  They would say “and now starts the cadence” and lose any interest in the music that followed.  I felt that cadences can be lovely music.  So when later I got back to that work I created a 3 section piece for piano and flute.

I liked the idea of replacing the flute part with a soprano and adding lyrics to express the sentiment I felt was in the music.

It’s The Little Things

The second song asks the listener “Do you know what it is that makes me fall in love?”  The melodic idea to that song came to me while writing the piano piece “Seek and Ye Shall Find!”  I wrote that during the time I was playing around with ideas about harmony in octatonic scales (for more on that please see elsewhere in my notes on this website).

After I had finished “Seek” I felt that I had not done the melody enough justice and that a song would get me off the hook.

I had found it interesting that you can come up with lovely melodic ideas in an 8 note scale and in others as well.  My tutor at the time was quite surprised when I came up with what I thought was a lovely idea in a pentatonic scale that he had devised on purpose to make things hard for me.  Yes, this sounds like I am showing off and I am sorry, but really to be honest I was just lucky that I got some ideas that worked very well.

Will You Be My Friend?

“Will you be my friend?” came into being as part of “My Happy Idea”, which I have written about in a separate section at length.  Why I thought that this would be a good song on the topic of “Will you be my friend?” I cannot tell you, but it felt really good when that idea popped into my head.  Yes, I am not sure if I came up with good reasons in the lyrics and will be happy for someone to improve on my ideas.

Why, Just Why?

“Why, just why?” I am really very fond of!  It is a song for soprano and cello. The soprano starts and after a bar the cello starts playing the “accompaniment” which itself turns into the second part of the song for the soprano, whilst the cello at that time plays what the soprano sang at the beginning.

I had read about the student movement to protest on Fridays the lack of effort to do something about global warming so this topic was on my mind and I wrote the lyrics on that theme for this sone.  I would love to learn if this song really works for a soprano and if the combination of cello and soprano comes out as well as it does for the cello and flute.

Talking about favorites I find it interesting that what I consider to be my favorites are not necessary those that another person would select or say “I really liked that one” when I play my music for them.  Not that this happens very often, but I found it interesting.  For example one of my other favorites is my Trio III, also written in octatonic scale style but 2 others preferred my Trio II to it.  Such is life!

A Gentle Breeze and Tree of Love

For the next 2 songs I did things the other way around.  I had come up with what I thought were possibly 2 melodies I could use in a new quartet I still want to write for flute, English horn, viola and cello (the reason for those instruments is that they sound good to me when the software plays it).  Unlike with my “Happy Idea” in this case I thought it would be better to first write the songs before getting into the quartet.

First I thought that possibly I could make these 2 melodic ideas into one song but I was not able to do it and they landed up being 2 separate songs.  They do in a way feed each other so that maybe they could be played one after the other?

Morning Glory

The last song is based on lyrics that were written over 35 years ago by a school friend at the time of my daughter.  Jill was dying from brain cancer and wrote these notes for her family and friends.  I always thought they were very moving.

A few weeks ago my daughter Olivia, who now lives in England told me that a daughter of a close friend of hers had a friend who was dying of brain cancer, and my daughter asked me if I had the words that Jill had written somewhere in my collection of documents.  I thought that I probably did not but did look for them and found them.  Olivia was delighted to be able to share them with her friend.  She also asked me if I could set it to music.  I again said that I was not sure but then felt that I should give it a go.  I do hope the music supports that very moving text.

I suspect I will continue to be challenged to write songs based on melodies that I want to work with.  At the same time I will continue to be challenged to write what I hope will turn out to “mind boggling” instrumental pieces as well!