Today we look at how to develop fully formed musical ideas and create themes from scratch. Whether you are writing a score, a song, a video game or a symphony, you need a place to start. Developing a clear image of what you are trying to create is key. That requires time and space.
Writing Beethoven’s Fifth
There is an SNL skit where John Belushi portrays Beethoven sitting at the piano, trying to compose the four-note theme of his Fifth Symphony. He keeps playing the wrong last note and is beyond frustrated trying to find the right one. Each time he hones in on the solution, his wife (Gilda Radner) walks in and nags him to do a chore.
Time for Reflection
I remember that skit because distractions so often keep us from the focus we need to compose music. It’s not a task which can easily be done piecemeal or part time. One benefit of composing in television is that the schedules are so tight that there is no time to think about the writing. You just grab the first notes that make sense and craft something appropriate. You hope it is tasteful and has the right tone for the scene according to the grander narrative of the project. There is no choice in that moment but to put your best foot forward and churn it out as quickly as possible. Afterwards, you look back over the work and realize it’s possible to produce quality in quantity under pressure; once you focus on the tools, the materials and the task.
Churning It Out vs Mulling It Over
John Williams said that he spent far more time mulling over the few notes of a theme like Raiders of the Lost Ark than he would on entire passages of the score. When I worked with Steve Jablonsky on the Transformers movies, he took many, many weeks to initially develop the themes. He knew Spielberg would be listening to them so he did a good deal of soul searching and fretted over each note.
Capturing the Essence
In contrast to this method, I took a different tack on a recent project. Ordinarily, I would either write ideas down by hand, or go directly to inputting them as midi into a sequencer. This time, I recorded improvisations of thematic ideas on my phone as they occurred to me. Each time I found one at the piano, I hit record and thought, “Tell the beginning, the middle and the end of this story.” Through this process I was able to find the essence of an idea before I could think about it too much. From there, I plotted out and catalogued the germs of the main themes.
Spinning Out Material
Typically, the improvs were three to five minutes long. Once I printed one, I immediately composed a variation. Since my idea was saved, I didn’t have to worry about remembering or perfecting it. I could just spin out more material. This freed me up to continue to explore another tempo or a darker mode or different feeling. The result was that after about a week or so I had over two hours of recordings of all the seeds I needed for my project.
Separating From Your Habits
Listening back to the recordings is a different experience than having the notes under your hands on the piano. It is easy to get stuck in your hand-muscle memory of going to certain patterns and chords when you play. This is why Hans Zimmer said to us, “Sit on your hands when you are writing a theme.” He meant for us to learn to separate from our habits, and try to conceive the music outside of the physical limitations of our body.
A Tapestry of Ideas
Listening back is a favored pastime. Since I had improvised ideas in all different directions, they formed an organic tapestry of concepts. I was able to extract and distill several different themes, textures, phrases and structures which were interrelated. The fun was in rediscovering the cool things that I had stumbled upon when I pushed into the unknown. The playback experience made me find things in the improvs that I would have lost in fumbling with a pencil and paper.
Record Improvs
I encourage you to try this method of starting a project. Make it a tool in your modus operandi. It has proved to be a cool way of creating a pool of cohesive thematic material. I leave you now with this snippet of an improv on my old upright piano, and the resultant finished track called Shipwreck Cove which I conducted and recorded in Budapest last Fall.
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