Variation: 14 Ways to Compose with One Idea

one of the most common things I hear from composers is I found this idea I really like it but I just don't know what to do with it next I don't know how I should carry on it can feel quite stressful to feel that you've got that blank page and no inspiration so sometimes one of the best approaches is rather than continuing that hunt in the dark for another new idea stick with what you've already got and instead find ways to vary it now a musical idea might be anything from a short phrase or bassline or a chord progression or it might be a fully formed melody and the ways we can vary it range from the very simple to as we'll see something much more extreme so I'll use an idea most of us already know the tune Amazing Grace and we'll make a bunch of variations our first variation technique is melodic variation the simplest way to do this is to embellish the melody which simply means add a few extra twiddles there lots of different kinds of embellishment but this usually involves playing the note itself and one or more of the neighboring notes in quick succession so if the original tune was a series of dots on a line like this you could think of adding a wiggle to our line there's one called a mordant which just goes up and down and there's a turn which kind of turns around the main note to make a kind of wiggle and then there's the trill which is usually the note and the one above played several times in fast succession so a really embellished version of our tune might look like this next up we can vary the rhythm our Tunes currently in 3/4 but we might change the time signature and turn it into a 2 for March or we might split the chunks between the two registers and add little light syncopation my initial idea might be more than just a melody it might have some harmony here's a typical traditional harmony that might go under our theme so harmonic variation simply means changing these chords to something else the tune stays the same but the landscape it sits in has changed and this can alter the feeling of things quite a bit [Music] a common trick with harmonic variation is to change the mode so we could change our melody for example from major to minor which will of course change the feeling completely [Music] now so far we're talking about just doing one variation so we've perhaps doubled the length of our original idea and sometimes this will be all you need here's a melody from Chopin's Nocturne in F minor and he follows it straight away by a variation you it's just a way of extending the melody live and here's an example from one of my own pieces this is a little idea from my clarinet quintet gumboots [Music] and a little later in the piece here is an embellished version of it a variation on variation is a technique is to something most of us composers use in one way or another but variation can be more than a technique it can be used to create whole structures and in classical music that's usually called variation form the idea of variation form is as obvious as it sounds just loop round and round your idea creating a piece made up of a bunch of different variations on that idea but isn't that going to make things a bit well predictable well it certainly can do but if you think about it most jazz basically does exactly this his quarry Henry improvising on our Amazing Race theme and the more you listen to it the more you realize it's just variation formed by another name far from being predictable and boring the fact the improvisation cycles around the theme provides structure to the improvisation giving us a kind of reference point to return to when things get extreme and much of the pleasure in listening to a solo like this is in simultaneously listening out for where we are in the structure whilst marveling at how far the soloist is taking us away from it in fact jazz gives us a clue to one of the main ways variation form works in classical music we've seen how we can keep the melody the same very the harmony but we can also keep harmony the same and change everything else above it sometimes the harmony might be a series of chords sometimes it might just be a bass line some of the earliest examples were what's known as the ground base or the Basso ostinato which means the obstinate bass and you can certainly hear that happy obstinacy in this example of the dance known as the burger massacre by marco giallini which uses the basic 1 4 5 1 bass pattern and just keeps going round and round [Music] these kind of ground-based pieces that often also imply harmony above were also sometimes known as Chacon or PASOK alias one of the best-known examples of a ground-based pieces Pachelbel's Canon it's strange to think of it this way but the theme or the main idea for this piece is just these eight notes which form the baseline for the entire piece so if the musical idea you've thought of has a bass line in a harmony this is another way you can make it go a lot further remove the melody and just treat the chords that remain as a starting point for something new so here the melody bears no resemblance to amazing grace but the chords are just the same only now I've just stretched them out into a 4/4 bar to give the melody some more space you one of the problems with this kind of obstinate bass or repeated chord patterns as a form is how to keep the levels of interest up even a popular piece like Pachelbel's Canon is known for its ability to well get on your nerves after a while this is something that composers have always struggled with when doing a series of variations there's not the inherent drama of a form like Sonata form where opposing ideas battle it out instead here you just have one idea going round and round one of the most common ways to try and overcome this is to increase the complexity of things as the piece progresses this is already something composers in the Renaissance and the Baroque periods did in pieces known as diferencia or divisions where the harmonic rate of the chord stays the same but the number of notes per chord increased this is Handel's famous piece known as the harmonious blacksmith from the 1720s and at the end of each phrase I've just jumped cut to the next variation so you can see how the speed of the notes just gets faster and faster as we go up so in this variation I've again kept the harmonic outline of Amazing Grace but now I filled in the space between the chords with runs of thirty-second notes so maybe this all sounds a bit crude to you I mean just speeding up the note sounds a bit simplistic right well it's time to check in on a couple of masters barks Goldberg Variations is perhaps the ultimate piece to look at this method of composing over a fixed chord progression Barker starts the work with a simple melody and then extracts just the harmony and uses it to generate no less than thirty variations and all stick pretty closely to the chords of the melody it's an amazing example of inventiveness which is sure to give you some ideas and similarly Beethoven's dear belly variations tends to keep at least the bare-bones harmonic outline of it's pretty ordinary opening walls theme but then it subjects that theme to all kinds of abuse [Music] as pianist Alfred Brendel said it's improved parodied ridiculed disclaimed transfigured more and stumped out and then finally uplifted it's a real showcase of how far you can push an idea so if you ever feel like you don't know what to do with your idea choose any one of the variations of either of these muster pieces and have a good look at it and I'm sure you'll find something to inspire you in my case I think the inspiration may have come a little too close to outright theft but don't forget I'm still using the amazing grace quartz here which made the composing so much easier than if I'd been staring at a blank page one of the things Beethoven did which we haven't looked at yet is more advanced ways of varying a melodic idea and the trick here is not to think of your melody as an unbreakable hole but as something you can tear apart and use the pieces of to make something new Beethoven even builds a whole fugue variation out of just this little moment of falling forth and a whole bunch of repeated notes so even the most unpromising material can be used to good end here's another famous theme by Paganini from which the composer made his own set of variations but it also went on to be very popular with a whole bunch of other composers as the basis for their own variations so let's say you're a composer who's decided to do some variations on this theme let's say your name is Rachmaninoff let's choose just a little fragment to this theme and see what we can do with it so this bit seems quite catchy let's play with a load of those really fast and see what happens okay not bad so what if we say flip it on its head now so we'll start from here let's see this one goes up a minor third so we'll go down a third this one goes down a minor 2nd so we'll go up a minor 2nd major 2nd perfect 5th yeah [Music] notice that once we've taken that initial idea the rest of the variation that Rachmaninoff does is pretty free it only has the loosest connection to our original idea but that's not really the point the point is we've moved on we've made some progress we're composing so I've taken a similar little fragment from Amazing Grace and that became the basis for this whole little dance it helps to have four hands if you want to do YouTube videos paganini's peace and Rachmaninoff's variations on it pointer another way to compose with our idea that we haven't looked at yet and that's to work with tone color or Tamra here's Paganini's own variation where instead of playing the violin with the bow he's using a special type of pizza car so the left hand pits which produces a really unusual popping kind of effect of course how much you can play with Tamra depends on the instrument you're composing for but there's plenty you can do even say at the piano Rachmaninoff's piece starts by adding just a touch of extra spice to the tune these little dissonant grace notes which emphasize those staccato notes so we think of that little fragment that we pulled from paganini's theme as a dot followed by a slide up and down we'll try to imagine a more extreme version of that a sharper point a slide ear slide and we're composing again before we get to the most extreme kinds of variations there are also numerous other ways you might think of playing around with your theme which we don't have enough time to fully go into here another form you could draw inspiration from as a kind of variation is the Indian raga now the idea of araga and this is vastly oversimplifying is that it's not just a mode or a scale but it's a series of ways of moving around a scale series of ideas you might say and a raga improvisation is well a kind of variation on those ideas and we might attempt something a little similar by say breaking up our tune into a series of fragments and then thinking of these as some of our main tools to play with [Music] hetero phony is the idea of playing several versions of a theme simultaneously possibly at different speeds such happens in Balinese gamelan music so this might be another way you could find to vary your idea [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] our penultimate variation should I think finally convince you that it's possible to travel pretty much anywhere you want to with your one little idea this is the fourth string quartet by the American experimental composer Ben Johnston who is famous for writing some of the most difficult music in the string quartet repertoire full of extremely complex tuning systems and rhythmic devices but this whole quartet surprising as it may sound is a set of variations on Amazing Grace it opens with a simple version of the melody accompanied by a series of fifths tuned in pure intonation [Music] and by the end of the piece the tune is still there but it's almost like it's been overgrown by these tendrils coming at it from all sides [Music] [Applause] [Music] you get the feeling Johnston has thought about every aspect every harmonic and melodic implication of this little melody and then pushed each of them to their furthest extreme this is variation form to the max but I don't want to end on the most extreme because this isn't a competition as fun as Ben Johnson's piece is there's no prizes for writing the most extreme thing the key thing is you found your idea it might be the tiniest scrap of an idea and by using some of these techniques of variation you might I hope find a way to turn the idea into the reality of a fully formed piece of music and all that's left for me to do is wish you well on your journey thank you so much for watching I do hope you enjoyed this video if you're new here do check out my channel where there's plenty of other videos about composing and music in general if you'd like to support the channel do consider joining my patrons over at patreon as it's their support that makes the channel possible thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: David Bruce Composer

Views: 217,380

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Length: 17min 42sec (1062 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 03 2020