structure of music

hi, im new in this forum, and i've been taking an ap music theory class for my senior year, and i have a problem with composing. I can write themes (eight measures or so) but i have a problem. I don't know how the rest of the musical structure is. I know the basics of form (binary ternary etc...) but its hard for me to turn eight measures into 100 measures or over. Could anyone please give me some tips or insight, or direct me to a website that could help me?

Well, the title of a thread is kind of mis-leading. Your problems aren't on musical structure itself, it's on development. I'm not sure how much help I can be in this department seeing as how I'm not terribly great with development myself but I'll make an attempt.

First off, you're rather vague on what exactly you want to write. Generally, one eigth measure theme isn't going to be enough material to write an ENTIRE piece (unless you're going for minimalism). Music generally consists of two contrasting themes. Of course, this varies largely on what exactly you want to write so I'm afraid I can't be of more assistance there.

As far as development goes, there are many things you can do. You can keep the rhythm of melody the same but change the notes; keep the notes the same but change the rhythm; double the note values of each note (for example, if you have a theme consisting entirely of quarter notes, you would make them half notes); half the note values (same thing except in reverse); play the melody backwards; break the melody into bite-sized bits and scatter them through out (like say if you have a theme that is E, G, A, G, B, F#, you could fragment the E, G, A, and have it recur liberally throughout the piece); keep the melody entirely the same but change the underlying harmony; transpose the entire melody to a different key; remove or add a note to the melody; add small ornaments. And that's just scratching the surface. There is a ton you can do. And upon each small development you make, you can additionally develop that. The key is to generate a good amount of material which you can develop. If you create too much material, then you might confuse your audience. If you create too little material, you'll bore them. Of course, the "right" amount is very subjective.

Hopefully this was at least somewhat informative. It would be much easier to help if you actually posted a theme for people to hear.

"Fundamentals of Musical Composition", by Arnold Schoenberg

I think this will solve all of your problems. It is an incredible book that takes upon the topic of form, and talking about motifs, phrases, themes, development and larger forms in detail and by using a lot of examples from the musical literature (mostly Beethoven). You can get it for 12 dollars from Amazon.com, which should cost less than Friday night out.

there are many types of forms and you can even make up your own structures and forms.

just make sure your music has coherence and unity.

Form doesn't seem to be your problem. In eight measures, you "could" have the makings of an entire piece, but there are some steps you should take before you start going in the direction of writing 100 measures or more. Here are things you can try on paper/computer to "sketch" out your eight measures in more ways.

1.) If you've got a modal idea (as in, a diatonic melody or tonal harmony of some sort), you can work out all of your transpositions of the idea. If it's a non-tonal idea, you can work out the inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion of your initial idea. It doesn't have to be 12-tone, it just needs to be a motiv, gesture, or melody that you can work with. This works for diatonic ideas as well, so feel free to do both in either case. Don't be afraid to change pitches as you hear them change. This is the whole reason for doing it, because you want to explore how that idea can change.

2.) Combine different transpositions and/or inversions of the idea. Maybe a melody between two or more ideas can develop from this. Again, keep changing pitches as you hear them, and save all your work. You never know when an idea will become useful down the timeline of your process. Also, don't be afraid to change durations of those pitches. The idea is to generate something distinctly different from the original idea. If you get to that point, you have a new idea for your next section (or maybe a second piece, who knows?). Then, repeat step one on this new idea. Build, build, build as you keep generating more and more ideas from the initial gesture or motif.

3.) Make rhythmic changes to the ideas. If an idea starts on the downbeat, try a transposition of it that begins on an upbeat. If you have an idea with more straightforward rhythm, try making a version of it that is more rhythmically ambiguous (concealing the downbeat). Try to find areas where you can make an idea feel "more natural" to you. If it feels like it is rushed or is dragging, try to compensate with gradual rhythm changes to those areas, using triplets if you're mostly using eighths, or eighths if you're using more triplets.

4.) Apply harmony to the idea(s) you come up with. Put it in tonal harmony by coming up with a bass line, then add your middle voices. Or, if it's more serial, take the pitches of one or more of those ideas and stack them as chords. Play with these ideas and build several progressions of these harmonies. Strip away the linear material and just use the harmonies. Invert them, mess with interval spacing. Take these harmonies and combine them, work within them to create flow and change between them.

5.) From these harmonies, take some time to produce new melodies and gestures. See QCCowboy's post on how this is done here. Reproduce this process many times to produce several different phrases or even sections of music. You might not use all of these ideas, but many of them may be useful to you in other works.

6.) Start combining different ideas. Start with two ideas, maybe splice in a bar or even a couple of beats from a third idea, or just build from the two you like. Make sections, then, do the same thing you did with the initial gesture and transpose those ideas. Play with leading voices into new ideas, so they flow together. Work in larger, more spaced out intervals from your sketches into some of the sections. See if you can either begin with these or maybe lead up to them. From here, you're starting to build a piece.

7.) Imagine you're working with a polyphonic texture (melody over harmonic accompaniment). Play with changing that texture. See if you can find ideas within the inner voices that you can turn into another melody. Take the original melody and the new melody and create a heterophonic texture from it (generally a second melody happening in combination with the first, generally as a call response or syncopated as not to sound at the same time). Make a solo out of those two lines, merging them into one voice, and you have a monophonic texture. Take that new line and write a line to accompany it. Or harmonize it for a new polyphonic section. You may even get a full section out of this if you combine all of these phrases.

Once you've done this several times, find ideas that seem to be central to your work. You may have two that really stand out, but the criteria here is that they must not have the same characteristics. If one idea begins on a downbeat, the other idea generally wouldn't. If one idea has more step-wise intervals, the other idea should be more spaced out. If one idea is diatonic, go for an idea that isn't, if you want to combine styles in your work.

After you've reached this point, we can start talking about form :)

Hey you might think that this advice is passing the buck but here is a few thoughts.

a)the Schoenbergian idea of total organicism is not really true unless you are writing serially or using pitch-class sets. However, having said that it is also true that the idea of development is often confused with variation. In fact in most cases development is a kind of non-obvious variation that takes place. For this you can look at Beethoven's Third symhony. b)In most cases development is the combination of variation techniques such as ornamentation or adding or leaving out notes with things like texture change and key change.c) Oh and remember that the most obvious kind of development technique is pattern and sequence or modified sequence. d)Another idea I have is that you can look at Mozart's structures. Ask yourself why is it that he sometimes repeats an idea and when does he change the idea - usually when the idea ends or is complete., he repeats or gives a modifeid repeat when the idea ends 'open'. Thus it has got to do with the level of closure that you find at the end of your theme and thus ultimately it has to do with the nature of your material or theme itself. d)Another idea that you can think of is that a theme does not necessarily give rise to the large-scale structure and that you need to impose one. Thus you might need additional material and work out a kind of narrative or if you want you can see that e) structure is a kind of psychological process that plays itself out as the music. Think for instance of the idea of a gradual process of change that takes place over a longer period of thime - this is very akin to the minimalist use of process-structure but you can see this also in the music of Ligeti. f)I think that you need to ask yourself first is if you want a clear sectional kind of form or a more fluid one.

g)oh and the last thing that comes to mind is that development and large scale form is a result of rythmic processes so that means if you have a good rhythmic grammar decided on it should give you an idea of how the form will be also hahaha!! Oh and remember that rondo form works very well for a lot of things and you can always modify the standard model to suit your needs).

lastly h) alwyas think about what you need for the piece and whatb kind of form will suit the character of what you are wanting to say -

hope this helps!!!

"Fundamentals of Musical Composition", by Arnold Schoenberg

I think this will solve all of your problems. It is an incredible book that takes upon the topic of form, and talking about motifs, phrases, themes, development and larger forms in detail and by using a lot of examples from the musical literature (mostly Beethoven). You can get it for 12 dollars from Amazon.com, which should cost less than Friday night out.

2nded.

Best book I've ever bought. I'm not exaggerating, I've learnt more from that text than from 5 years of school musical education.