Beginner Vs Pro Composer: Can you hear the difference?

this is frank and his girlfriend mika a couple of months ago i put out a call for people like frank who had just completed their first ever composition and frank was one of the people who responded now taking that first step as a composer requires a fair amount of self belief especially if like frank you're trying to impress your girlfriend my name is frank i'm 23 years old i'm dutch so i live in the netherlands in leiden i study astronomy i'm a masters student i'm doing astronomy research so about planets and all that but i've been interested in music basically all my life and since i was about 18 i wrote music and this piece i wrote is actually for my girlfriend i wrote it uh for our one year anniversary i think and it was supposed to be this cutesy piece kind of like a pixar ratatouille kind of uh kind of vibe so frank had written his piece and by all accounts mika loved it but frank was aware that he was just starting out as a composer and he really wanted to improve so today we're going to look through his piece and see if we can work out what to do to take frank's love song to another level i'm going to use all frank's material but rewrite it completely we'll talk through the changes i've made and at the end we'll see what mika herself thinks of the new version so even through the door i could hear you scream i'd like to think that over the years i've become quite good at spotting the potential in these kind of pieces and my aim here really is to show that in a beginner's composition the musical idea itself is often really good and all it needs is a little polishing and finessing to turn it into something truly impressive [Music] i have about eight hours of storage space so i should be fine i think my audio is going my videos going uh my mic set up so are you feeling nervous yeah no i'm i'm very curious about what you've done okay so at this point i played frank the computer midi recording and i was going to play that to you as well but in the end we managed to find a group to record both of these pieces live for us at the royal college of music in london i'll explain later how that came about and how frank ended up being there in person to hear his first ever composition performed live by real musicians it's frank suffice to say it was a pretty exciting day for him so here's what his original first ever composition sounded like when it was performed live [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so first of all i just love the piece i mean it's it's so sweet and cute i love i could totally hear the the pixar ratatouille i really can feel that in it i just love the tone of it and before we start i wanted to say you might not realize it but you're actually really lucky to have such a clear reason and motivation to write you know when when as composers we don't always know the the feeling or the atmosphere that we're trying to create you know sometimes we might be focusing on a particular technical issue rather than a specific emotion or idea but when you have a specific idea like this it can sometimes really help narrow down your compositional choices i can remember that the main melody i almost got that as a present you know and then the other parts i thought of them around that with the idea of it having to be about a romantic thing i mean as an example of how useful it is to have some kind of idea or concept in mind when i was reworking your piece what i was doing seemed to be trying to push me into a sort of darker direction at one point oh no but then i realized uh that's not what we were after we were trying to keep this sweet tone we were aiming at so that helped me keep it back on track where we were going with it so to give everyone watching their bearings i've labeled the sections of the piece it's basically four sections you've got an a section that repeats a b section that repeats a c c-section that repeats and then back to an a section which repeats so let's start from the beginning and i'll talk you through some of the changes and i've got ten main ideas to talk about perfect and of course i'm not saying this is what you should have done i'm just pointing out some of the thought processes you might have to develop an idea like this and take it to the next level so the first idea i had for you is to hold stuff back or as my old teacher used to put it don't show your hand too early in the game think of a piece a bit like a story a good story will hold our interest by having revelations interesting new scenes and by not introducing all of the characters all at the same time i think this is really the core thing you should think about because you start out as you said with four instruments with the whole registral space from top to bottom filled out and then you stay with that texture throughout so i think we need to hold some of these things back to keep the interest later on oh and i should say by the way just because we've got four instruments doesn't mean we only have four characters you could say that each instrument contains within it a whole family of different characters you know they've got the high flute the low flute the middle flute but then there's even the staccato flute the legato flute and so on and each one of those sounds can feel like a new character entering the story so treat them like that and make sure that when you do introduce a new character it's it's for a good reason yeah that's so interesting so here's my version of the beginning of the piece you've got the copy of the score there right yes i have it here completely unlooked at time to open it up all right i can't wait i grant you permission thank you thank you it's like a present so let's plunge straight in and you can see here at the beginning i decided straight away to make us wait for the arrival of the tune itself so i added an extra 16 bars at the start and i just copied across your accompaniment but you'll notice that i marked it all very quietly and i jammed it all in close register all together in the middle so then when the tune finally arrives up in the high flute it feels like a significant moment that makes sense but i did decide to try and keep a little interest going by passing the accompanying figures around the different instruments so already in the first 16 bars everyone's had a little go at this background melody and i think that gives us a nice flavor of our ensemble while still really holding back most of the juiciest sounds we've got available to us hmm foreign [Music] so then the flute comes in at that point and if you have a new instrument taking over the main line like the flute here it can be an idea to have little scale or a run into it just to draw the ear towards the new instrument [Music] i think that's very difficult to kind of draw the attention to different parts of the music and have the attention shift around from instrument to instrument it's almost like giving a little help to the listener the little pointer this is where it's going to be coming now just put your attention on this bit now true yeah and here's a similar example after eight bars i decided to pass the main line over to the oboe and i gave it this two note lead in just to guide the ear toward the new instrument [Music] this then led me to explore adding some variation to the melody i could feel the melody wanting to jump back up to that high d that i'd used that really felt like it sort of spoke to me at that point i could just hear that going lord [Music] i i guess it's very sing-song at uh yeah it's almost like yodling and then i moved your accompaniment up an octave so the flute and the oboe overlapping register and seem to intertwine with each other and i felt all of this heightened that same emotion that you were expressing i think it adds to the yearning quality that we have in the piece that's uh that's very interesting yearning [Music] [Applause] [Music] and i felt like the newly varied a section was interesting enough to warrant a repeat now so i did that but with a busier accompaniment the second time round and again this is to maintain the interest [Applause] now one thing i would say is that this piece as you wrote it has a very predictable pattern of eight bars followed by eight bars followed by eight bars but it's not just that the harmony also moves at the same speed it changes in a regular way and each phrase ends exactly where we'd expect and this can end up feeling a little bit tiring it's like hearing somebody talking when you already know exactly what they're going to say sure yeah so keep your eyes open for opportunities to change things up the stripy bits in this chart show you the bits that i've added there was that 16 bar introduction and then to build into the b section i simply repeated the last two bars twice just building the anticipation a little bit into the new section but the largest change i made at this sort of structural level was the change from the b to the c section this was where i really felt that the predictable eight bar pattern was starting to get a bit tiring so i actually did away with it all together and instead allowed the music to kind of fade out and wind down into this little bassoon solo oh that's really interesting i would have never thought of that [Music] [Music] i think it's really important sometimes to give music these kind of treading water moments where nothing much happens again it's a good kind of storytelling so that when the c-section finally does arrive it feels like a new direction or a new beginning and this was the area where i felt that things could have gone up a bit darker i felt like that bassoon solo could have twisted into a sort of darker more chromatic place but then i realized that we we wanted it to stay in this overall positive tone so i avoided it going in that direction and i pulled it back again yeah i i would love to hear the darker version by the way at some point and notice how both of these structural changes i've made are at the the joins between two sections i often find that it's these kind of joins or transitions between two ideas that will require a lot most of your attention as a composer don't be afraid of spending you know hours working on a little section or pouring over one of these moments just to get it just right they're often very difficult but they all make a big difference and make the piece really start to come together when you get those right i guess yeah yeah now another thing is it's quite common when you're just starting out to feel the pressure of writing you know proper chords to feel that each bar has to change to a new recognizable chord to have a kind of logic that you understand from music theory that you you're doing everything as you're supposed to but sometimes some of the most beautiful moments i think come from places where you as the composer don't fully understand the logic of what you've written it's maybe even when you move away from knowing what you're doing that your your own voice starts to emerge i mean it sounds kind of strange and counter-intuitive but that actually does make a lot of sense and definitely keep your ears open for accidental discoveries if you you know forget to transpose something or leave out an accidental sometime it can lead to an unexpected kind of beauty and if it does then embrace it treat it like you know a gift from the creative gods don't feel embarrassed that you didn't create it yourself it just came to you that's that's perfect a tiny little example of that is the g here in the oboe it feels like we're on a d major chord in this bar so the most logical choice for the first note of the oboe would be an a and it sounds fine but i felt an intuition without particularly thinking about the theoretical side that i should keep the g from the previous bar it just seemed more interesting more expressive than a theoretically right note [Music] i've come across this in guitar playing you get some chords which are obviously just there because somebody once thought i'll see what happens when my hand slides higher up i think it's really important to think less about theories and more about being open to the joys of accident and fortune [Music] now the next one is quite a big one for me i think a lot about the ways to vary the overall register in a piece so i mentioned how i started in the mid register at the start of the b section there's a really significant change in the register we've been focused on the upper middle register and then suddenly for the first time in the piece i brought in the low bassoon and the clarinet right down as low as it goes on the clarinet it gets very juicy down there at the same time almost as a way of emphasizing the change i pushed the oboe and the clarinet right up to the top of their range [Music] but notice i didn't stay with that low register for too long i felt like it would start to bog the piece down so i ended up quickly returning to the middle register i suppose thinking about register also makes you aware of the range of instrumental combinations you have so your version uses all four instruments all the time we've already seen that i carved out that bassoon solo but then i also followed it with a moment with no flute at all [Music] and then a section later with just clarinet and bassoon and that not only changes the register it but it also freshens up the palette and gives a different perspective on the instruments that we're using it adds to the you know the changing scenery of the story and keeps it interesting and still sticking with register be aware sometimes of the overall direction register takes the best example of that is just before the end there's a quite subtle register rise in the oboe and bassoon they just creep higher in their range giving a sort of background sense of tension rising and then the flute reaches a high g just to give you a sense of culmination and completion that's the highest note we hear in the whole piece and it's worth pointing out that neither of these are particularly flashy they don't make a point of their position they just show you how changing register can help manipulate the emotions almost behind the scenes [Music] okay now one of my favorite parts of your piece is the ending the way it holds in that sort of suspended state at the end it feels open-ended and to me it sort of suggests that the relationship is going on and going to carry on into the future so you can actually hear the metaphor that the music seems to be expressing i don't know whether that's the way you thought about it uh yeah obviously no i just wanted to end it no by the way the the ending was one of the the parts that i was most satisfied with too so hearing you say that is really is really cool i mean i i just found it really very touching and much much more interesting than if it was just you know a standard major chord and the point really is that be aware of it sounds like you are already but be aware of the metaphorical implications of the music because it can create some of the most powerful effects in the listener not everyone will necessarily pick up on it but the people who do it will definitely feel really powerful and you know if the if the metaphor ties in with the overall meaning or theme of the piece like it very much seems to here then it will really seem like you're doing something you know really deep and powerful to the listener oh well okay now part of the ending is that charming little upward phrase on the flute it's really nice but it does come a little bit out of nowhere we didn't hear that particular phrase anywhere else in the piece right no true i just felt like it the the flute needed to have one more moment so i i felt like i loved the phrase itself i really liked it but that feeling of the fact that it came out of nowhere made me wonder well could we now go back and find somewhere earlier in the music where we could fit in that little phrase and you remember we had that sort of bassoon solo section where the instruments faded out one by one to end up on the bassoon so i had had the idea at that point what about if we add that little phrase as each instrument leaves so they finish their phrase and then the end right [Music] and what that does is it kind of then integrates the phrase so that it feels more like it's part of the piece so when we hear it at the end it now feels like it belongs to the piece so yes it's a sort of like you've gone through forwards in you know moment by moment but it's it's worth then checking in and finding whether you can you know integrate things looking backwards at what you've already written so in light of the stuff that you've now got at the end of the piece can you find things that will make it seem even more powerful earlier in the piece yeah so the final tip is then to take a step back and look at the overall balance of the element so taking a sort of step back from that whole piece and seeing how all the different elements of it balance out across the whole piece and that might be the register the sort of change of pace of the harmony how the instruments are used i realized that at this point that the clarinet didn't at this moment have a very prominent solo so i added one here [Applause] [Music] and i also saved the busiest texture for the very climax of that piece it's at the sort of fairly typical golden section just a little bit before the end there's a full register range and a full texture and some of the most intricate rhythmic writing that i did [Music] but because we're still after this cute overall tone i did then also bring it straight back down and lead into the ending that you'd already written all right so that's it here let's let's have a listen alright alright i can't wait so now i'm gonna i'm gonna email at you because i didn't trust you not to listen to it i think it's all right wait actually um let me before you say that my uh my girlfriend just texted asking if she can come to my room oh yeah of course would she like to uh i think so yeah yeah she's she's on her way now so i want you to meet someone this is mika hello great to meet you a lot about you well you're lucky to have such a wonderful composer writing you beautiful melodies [Laughter] oh yeah definitely did you did you enjoy working on it i loved it yeah i really enjoyed it all right so nice it's so nice i mean i'm sure you make a lot of people very happy by investing time in you know what they what they made so well we're about to find out yeah or not okay so at this point i need to break in once again and explain what happened and how frank ended up coming to london i played the computer midi version of my reworking first to frank and then tamika but having done our zoom chat i then decided it was really worth seeing if we could get a group together to play both versions i put out a call on my social media accounts and very quickly got a response from aeolian winds who are currently studying at my old college the royal college of music they said they'd found a room and were able to get together in college just a couple of days later i told frank the good news and to my surprise he said right i'm getting on a plane and suddenly there we were at college literally fulfilling frank's dreams getting trained musicians to play his first ever composition it was honestly delightful to see how excited frank was to be as he put it somewhere where people spend all day thinking about nothing but music he absolutely loved it so thanks so much to aeolian winds and here's the full performance of my version of frank's piece followed by a few reactions from both frank and of course mika and finally we'll hear from frank straight after he heard his own music being performed live for the first time as always i'd like to thank my patrons on patreon for helping secure the time and resources it takes to make a video like this if you want to make more videos like this possible or if you want a pdf or mp3 of the piece please consider supporting the channel over at patreon [Music] foreign oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] yes [Music] oh boom [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] laughs wow wow it's insane oh it's so much um so much more dynamic or something there's uh yeah obviously there's so much more happening i i loved it i really did it's it's i could listen to it again and again it feels the same but then still different and i know right so cool it's it's got all of the the the cutesiness i think but it's also got a bit of tension at some point and a lot more uh yeah a build up and and uh several kind of climactic moments and then the the bassoon solo which uh completely unexpected with your song it's it it sounds more um like more is going on do you know what i mean and no no no no no it's like in this version i think this really goes to show what you can do with instruments instead of just transcribing it from piano to four instruments and adding some layers but really using instruments to you know tell their own stories within a story didn't enjoy that well it was uh it was it was spectacular it was so strange to uh to be there and in in a building like this with you know all of the everything around it you know and to be to have people who are so you know professional and play something that you wrote in your room unbeknownst you know having no clue uh and they played it so well and and i had no idea it could sound like this would you've written it differently you'd have known it was going to be played here i might have given them some space to breathe i didn't know that was going to be a problem but yeah no i uh only from this there's so much to learn and new things to put in recording or in the in the score so this was a an experience i'll be uh trying to kind of process over the coming year probably welcome to the world of composition thank you thank you [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: David Bruce Composer

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Id: OQ57dB3-VOI

Length: 30min 0sec (1800 seconds)

Published: Thu May 05 2022