wedding song for evan and diana

by paul, on 02.26.2011

When people find out I'm a composer, their reaction is usually something along the lines of "I could never do that", or similar. Writing music is one of the very, very few things that comes pretty naturally for me, but I understand the "I could never do that in a million years" feeling, because I am incapable of drawing even the most basic pictures.

I thought I'd write up a post on how I generally write music, both because I think every composer is a bit different, and as a way of de-mystifying the process a bit for anyone reading that isn't a musician.

My friends Evan and Diana asked me to write and play some music for the candle lighting ceremony for their wedding. This provided me with the first, most important thing I need in order to compose anything: A Deadline. there are many areas of life where I am very self motivated and productive: practicing guitar 3+ hours per day no matter what, waking up at ungodly hours of the morning to go boxing, shipping software at work, etc. Unfortunately, and maybe because it comes somewhat naturally, I am not very disciplined about composing and pretty much need some kind of deadline in order to get anything done. Once I have a deadline, I think about the piece and generally procrastinate until I reach the point where I must get it done, which, for the purposes of Evan and Diana's wedding, puts us at two saturdays ago, a week before the wedding. I have committed to playing, but haven't written a note.

First thing I do is fire up Sibelius, which is like a word processor for music. I used to write with a pencil and paper on score paper, but I stopped doing that years ago and usually write directly in Sibelius these days. Next, I decide what instruments I am going to use in my score. I am a guitarist, it is going to be just me playing at the wedding, why would I need to make this decision, shouldn't I write a score for guitar? For plenty of composers, I'm sure the answer is yes. But for me, I want to write something beautiful, majestic and stately, and when I think of those things, I think string quartet. I'll write something for string quartet, and figure out how to play it on guitar later.

I start with a blank score for 2 violins, viola, and cello. I decide on a waltz, and set the key to G. For me, the process of composing is a pushing and pulling of the melody and the harmony. in a string quartet, I generally start my sketch with the outer voices: a bass line, and a melody line. Sometimes, the bass line will suggest a melody line, and other times, the melody will suggest a harmony to go against it. One of the more interesting decisions you can make when composing is when to go against what first "suggests" itself in the other voice, my melody note may be D, and I may initially hear a G under it, but what if I decide to avoid that, and rather go for a Bb in the bass. It will mean I will have to re-write some parts from before, but that's ok. Sometimes, this decision will ripple all the way back through the piece to the very beginning, and end up changing the character.

For Evan and Diana's piece, I actually wrote the first 4 bars of the bassline first, and decided to borrow an F chord instead of staying in G the whole time. I find it extra easy to write very nice tonal music and sometimes need to make a conscious effort to go outside the key a bit. my score now looks like this: I keep going with the violin and cello, but if I hear any inner lines, I go ahead and write them in. the ideas I have for those may take over the main melody, or suggest a harmony also. an example of that is the viola line in my sketch

this process is essentially how I get from 2 instruments to 4, once I start a line, I'll keep it going until there is a natural musical ending for it or the piece ends. lots of times, I know where I want the piece to end, so when I get close to that, I'll write the ending and work backwards: That's pretty much it. I don't generally write using any kind of instrument, such as guitar or piano, although I do use Sibelius playback a fair amount to hear the overall structure and arc. This piece was easy to write, I needed it to be short enough so that I could repeat it and stop as soon as they were done lighting the candles.

Here is a PDF of the finished sketch, you can listen to a cheesy MIDI playback here.

The last thing I need to do is adapt it to guitar and learn to play it, which for this was relatively easy as it's a simple melody and harmonic background. I've recorded a version of me playing it which you can listen to on soundcloud.

One final thing I'd like to add is that after writing a piece, I have to learn it like everyone else does. I have never had a piece memorized after writing it, and I will forget them unless I practice it regularly. The act of writing a piece does not burn it into my mind forever, many people, even musicians, seem to think this is the case. If a piece takes me a really long time to write, then I will usually have it memorized by the end, just by virtue of having heard it a zillion times, but most of the music I write, and without exception the best of the music I have written, has been written down start to finish with very little editing. This is one area where I think everyone is a little different, some of the greatest composers who ever lived have toiled over 4 bars for hours. I might be a better composer if I did this, but it's just not my way and hasn't really proved very productive for me in the past.

This is probably my longest blog post ever, but I have found it pretty useful to describe a bit about what the composition process is currently like for me.