If you take any composition course, you will most likely be told to listen to and analyse music. But why? Often the process can be pretty daunting, particularly with orchestral music. A full orchestral score will have tons of staves, often certain instruments will be transposed, and pieces can end up being over 10 minutes long. It’s pretty easy to get completely lost. I’ve found myself in the past getting trapped into only taking generic surface-level notes about the instrumental choices of the composer. But if you know what to look for, and can get organised, there is a lot to discover and learn from. The things you discover can directly benefit your future compositions.

Contents

1) Where to begin?

2) Starting Points

Where to begin?

With so much music out there it is easy to become overwhelmed about where to even begin. A lot depends on what type of music you want to write. There are going to be different approaches depending on the style of music you are going for. As you can tell from this website, my main area of interest is orchestral music, and this is what I’ll be focussing on in this blog.

Finding Musical Scores

To study orchestral music, it is important to have good music reading skills. You’ll gain many benefits from being able to follow along to the music with a score. A slight challenge is actually accessing scores.

For all out of copyright classical music there is a fantastic website called IMSLP. This has a huge collection to choose from. It’s unfortunately much harder to find scores for copyrighted music though, in particular film music. The two main websites for film scores are Omni Music Publishing, based in the US and Chris Siddall Music Publishing, based in the UK. If you are based in the UK/Europe, then Schott Music sells a lot of Omni Music’s scores for a much cheaper postage fee. A quick look at these websites shows that these scores come at a cost. A free alternative is YouTube! Channels such as Brad Frey’s and David McCaulley’s, both of which have a great collection of score reductions. These are simplified scores highlighting the key elements along with some notes to go alongside, all linked to the actual recording. It’s worth mentioning that this is a great place to find John Williams’ scores.

Even with all the above links, your choice is still fairly limited. For certain pieces of music you’re going to have to use your ear. You can actually gain a huge amount from this practice – last year I wrote a blog on transcribing and replicating one of Michael Giacchino’s pieces from the TV series ‘Lost’.

Listening

This may sound obvious, but to find pieces to analyse you need to start by listening to music! It is important to broaden your musical horizons – search for playlists containing orchestral music you may not normally gravitate to. Obviously, there is still some merit in studying pieces you like, but only sticking to what you know will eventually cause your writing to stagnate. Some suggested starting places would be Holst’s ‘The Planets’, Bartok’s ‘Concerto For Orchestra’, Copland’s ‘Appalachian Spring’, and Ravel’s ‘Daphnis and Chloé’. But this barely scratches the surface.

When listening to something, you don’t necessarily have to enjoy the whole piece. Often however, something will stick out. When these moments happen, make sure you have somewhere to note down what track it is, what timestamp, and a very brief description of what you noticed. These moments will form a launchpad for your musical analysis!

Note-taking

Speaking of taking notes, it’s important to have a good system in place to make the most of your analysis. I discovered the program Notion, from a YouTube video by Ryan Leach. Notion allows you to create notes, that can include screenshots, photos, links to videos and music services. You can then categorise these notes, making them very easy to find when needed later down the line. The program is web based, so you can sync up your notes on your phone and your computer wherever you are. I would also strongly recommend watching Ryan’s Video, as his technique for analysis is very effective.

Starting Points

At this point you should have a list of musical moments that piqued your interest, along with their various timestamps, and why they stood out to you. Now potentially the reasons why they’ve stood out are glaringly obvious, and you may not need to investigate any further. But most of the time there is a lot more to explore. It’s time to make more detailed notes!

This can however be the trickiest part of the process. It’s very easy to freeze up and get stuck here. Below I’ve listed some potential starting points for you to look at. You don’t need to follow each category, but these should help you to dig deeper into the music: -

• Construction

• Form and Purpose

• Melody

• Contrast

Construction

Back when I did my degree in Orchestration at ThinkSpace, I had a very helpful one to one with one of the tutors, Mike Worth. He talked about how you can break down an orchestral piece into 3 main sections: - the ‘main thing’, the ‘other thing’, and ‘everything else’. Sounds simplistic, but is an incredibly helpful way to simplify a piece that potentially has 30 different staves of music. If each stave was doing something different, you would just have chaos, it would be impossible to follow what’s going on. And there are some pieces that do in fact take advantage of this fact to create chaos!

Most orchestral pieces are a lot simpler than they first appear. This approach condenses the score into 3 main parts. The ‘main thing’ refers to the part of the piece that you would go away humming. The ‘other thing’ is what gives the main thing context – i.e. the accompaniment and harmony. Finally, the ‘everything else’ is the part that makes the music shine! Think of runs, trills, and effects. Brad Frey uses a similar technique to this to create his score reductions. In the video you can see him highlighting similar parts of the score in the same colour.

What is great about breaking down the piece into just 3 different sections, is that it makes it much easier to follow what’s going on. You can see how the composer groups different instruments together, thus allowing your ear to get used to hearing the different timbres available. Also it allows you to focus on one section at a time. Be it the melodic part, or the accompaniment part. It might even be worth loading up a Sibelius or Dorico session and creating your own score reduction (one stave for the ‘main thing’, one stave for the ‘other thing’, and one stave for the ‘everything else’) to give yourself a foundation for the rest of your analysis.

I would certainly recommend doing this step first, before anything else.

Form and Purpose

Every section of music that you look at will be fulfilling some purposes within the whole structure of the piece. It could be useful to take a step back and look at the overall structure, and where the part you are focussing on lies within it.

Some pieces have very easy structures to spot, often film and game themes follow an ABA structure. An initial melody, a contrasting melody, and then back to the original melody. In this case if we were looking at a part of the B section, we could consider how this relates and contrasts to the original A section.

Understanding the purpose of the music you are listening to also helps get you into the mind of the composer. For example, you could ask why is there a woodwind run there? Maybe to transition into a new part of the melody, or perhaps to emphasise a climactic moment? With film music, it is definitely worth having an idea of what is going on at that point in the film, as the function of the music will always be in support of the scene.

Melody

A slightly more detailed approach could be to focus on the melody. This would be something to do once you have completed the construction step. Melodies at first are hard to analyse and it will take a bit of practice to become good at this. An effective method is to have a few set questions you’re going to ask yourself about the melody. Some potential questions to ask: -

-       Where is the motif?

o   How long is it?

o   How many repetitions of the motif can you spot?

o   How does the composer create variations of the motif?

-       What kind of contour does the melody follow?

o   Is it rising, falling, or roughly staying in the same area?

-       What register is being used?

-       Is the melody mainly stepwise, or does it have a lot of leaps?

-       Is it rhythmically stable, or unpredictable?

These questions at first might feel a bit abstract, but as you look at future melodies, you may start to see patterns, or features that you like. It’s a good idea to create a list for you to use, and have that stored up somewhere – these are great tools to avoid freezing up during analysis.

Contrast

In the last year I have been working my way through the various courses on Scoreclub. This is a website run by composer and orchestrator Alain Mayrand. I highly recommend looking into it. Something that has really stood out for me from his courses, is the importance of contrast in music. Contrast can be used to bring attention to key moments in music, or highlight cadences, or to highlight a new section in the piece. The great thing about music, is that there are so many things you can contrast! Again just like with the melody, it is worth building up a list of questions to follow when looking for these in the pieces you analyse. You can look for: Register, Dynamics, Rhythmic Activity, Harmonic Rhythm, just to name a few. See how these contrasts affect the music. It might even be the case that this section initially stood out to you because it was a moment of great contrast.

Other things to look out for

I have mentioned 4 worthwhile things to look out for during your analysis, but there is so much more to explore. Here are some other things to think about.

Cadence points: Cadence points are musical punctuation. They appear at section ends (like full stops), or at brief pauses (like commas). These are often key moments within a piece, that allow the listener to digest what they’ve heard. Without them the music would become an incoherent babble!

Key changes: How does the composer modulate? How do they draw attention to it? Or how do they make the transition as smooth as possible?

Transitions: Often during pieces with multiple sections, or film scores that have multiple big moments during a scene, the music needs to be able to seamlessly transition from mood to mood, section to section. There is a lot you can pick up from these moments. By the way here is a great video on the subject by Zach Heyde.

Accompaniment parts: Sometimes it’s hard to envision how to support a melody in your compositions. You can write a good melody with a strong harmonic foundation, but when it gets to orchestrating, you’re not sure what to do with all your instruments. This is a great time to look at how other composers achieve good accompaniment parts.

Instrumentation: Perhaps there is a certain timbre or sound that piqued your interest. Here you can look for how the composer used the instruments available to them. Any interesting combinations? Are there pairings you come across time and time again?

Analysing music is a hugely important development technique for your compositions. I can’t recommend it enough if you want to improve as a musician. You don’t need to take on a whole piece to learn something new either. Hopefully you can see from this blog, that it pays off to take a targeted approach to analysis. You’ll be surprised at how much you can take away from targeting moments that you pick up through your listening.

That’s all for today!

Dan