As a music major my senior year in college, theory and composition classes challenged me beyond my expectations.
We analyzed music compositions chord by chord, phrase by phrase, to inhabit and understand a composer's musical language. Our professor required us to be able to do solfege, which is being able to look at a music score and sing it unaccompanied using the proper pitch names (sol, fa, etc). We memorized intervals using mnemonic devices. I will always remember the minor seventh because Leonard Bernstein used it as the first two notes in the West Side Story song "Somewhere."
We also composed music. I've blocked out a lot of this part because it was an excruciatingly difficult experience for me. However, we sometimes gain the best insights from difficult lessons. I remember now two of the dozen or so compositions I wrote over the entire year.
The first was an assignment to compose a recitative: a piece that's "sung" speech-like and found in operas, oratorios, and cantatas. The music must match the syllabic rhythms of the text. Even before class was over, I had thought of the text I would use for my recitative: the opening of Edgar Allen Poe's short story "The Masque of the Red Death." I still have the musical markings in my copy of the story. I composed the recitative in D minor, emphasizing positive words like "happy" and "sagacious" with major chords. I remember having a lot of fun with this assignment, primarily because I was working with words. I aced it.
The second was our very last composition assignment. We had spent weeks analyzing J.S. Bach's music. His rules influenced all music after him. Our professor told us that we needed to be able to copy Bach before searching for our own compositional voices. The assignment: compose a four-voice fugue in the style of J. S. Bach — i.e. compose the fugue subject, bring in each voice, and then develop it for ten measures.
Oh. My. God. It took me seven days to come up with a fugue subject that I believed adhered to all of Bach's rules. Bringing each voice in added layer upon layer of complexity, and each chord must obey Bach's rules, plus each interval as the chords moved forward. The development, chord by chord of the four voices, also must follow the rules. By the time I finished, I could not wait to hand it in just to get rid of the thing.
The professor returned my fugue with "Please see me" written in red at the top. During his office hours, I went to his office for what I expected would be terrible news. Was he failing me? Would I graduate? He sat with me at his piano with my fugue before us and asked, "Cinda, what was the assignment?"
"To compose a fugue in the style of J. S. Bach."
"You composed a fugue in the style of Paul Hindemith."
I remembered he smiled kindly, which eased my humiliation a bit. We went through my fugue chord by chord (he thought my subject was fine) and I had to identify why it wasn't a Bach chord until he was satisfied that I really did know the rules. He passed me and I graduated.
What had I learned from studying composition? I loved working with words, not composing music.
Cinda Yager writes essays, fiction, and two blogs in Minneapolis. She loves classical music and has just published an e-book novel set in the classical music world, Perceval's Secret.
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