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Hello all,

I have a piece of music that I just don't know what to do with, but find lovely. I'm mainly having trouble coming up with new material to vary it. I've attached it, if you want to take a listen. It is based on the Greek myth of Selene and Endymion. 

 

 

 

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There are lots of ways to vary your material, here are some of them:

  • More ornamentation like mordents, trills, splitting a note into 2 eighth notes - this is the simplest kind of melodic variation there is
  • Harmonic variation, so like changing the harmony that is under the melody, jazzier harmonic texture, major minor switch, doesn't really matter(that second one, the major minor switch is so common in pieces by Haydn and later
  • Keeping the bass line constant or slightly changing while the melody changes with every variation - This is the basis for Chaconnes and Passicaglias
  • Breaking the melody into chunks and rearranging the original melody - This is common, especially with Beethoven and Mozart, and it is a more complicated form of melodic variation
  • The "4 Axes" as I like to call it, aka. Normal(that's your original melody), Inversion(this can be diatonic(in which case, you find the closest note in both character and half steps to the original) or complete half step inversion(in which case, you don't care about staying in the key, just the number of half steps matters), Retrograde(Same melody as the original, but backwards), and Retrograde inversion(same direction as original melody, but otherwise different enough)
  • Heterophony, playing multiple versions of your melody at the same time - This one may require diatonic transposition, aka. transposing to the fifth, fourth, third, or sixth while still staying in key, so be aware
  • Slowing down your melody and making it a bass line for a new or derived melody
  • Just slowing down the melody in general, even if you don't turn it into a bass line, you are going to get a different character than at original tempo
  • Speeding up the note values of your melody - This can be good for an ending variation, though I would be wary against using it early on
  • Just taking a single chunk of your melody and use it as the basis for your variation, Beethoven does this a lot
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  • 3 weeks later...

Go hard into the polyrhythm. Let things progress as though it were a crescendo or diminuendo hairpin but with the polyrhtyhm intensity, much like Stockhausen would. Or you could maybe take the Carter approach and continue two processes that join up out of nowhere but it fits seamlessly. Many things you could do with this, though the notation could be clearer.

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