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Composing within fixed scales:
textural possibilities for student composers
written by Dr. Diana Blom, University of Western Sydney
Introduction
Because of Australia's proximity to south-east Asia, and the attractive sound of the music of countries in this area, several contemporary Australian art music composers have borrowed scales and pitch sets from Asian countries as the basis for some of their compositions.
Despite the inherent restrictions embraced when working with these scales, the music of these composers retains the interest of both listener and performer because of the compositional devices and processes employed to shape the texture and direct the music's momentum
In this workshop, compositions by Australian composers Ross Edwards, Anne Boyd, Robert Lloyd and Peter Sculthorpe will be analysed. Excerpts from scores are included and publishing details are given so that teachers can work from the full score. From the analysis, some of the compositional devices identified will be combined into suggested composition tasks for students at secondary level.
To quote Nicholas Cook (1987), analysing music is "the practical process of examining pieces of music in order to discover, or decide, how they work. And... when you analyze a piece of music you are in effect recreating it for yourself; you end up with the same sense of possession that a composer feels for a piece he [or she] has written" (1). I like the way Cook says that through analysis we 'discover, or decide' how a piece of music works and I would also like to remind the reader that analysing a work is an individual action. My analysis - my interpretation of the score - may be different from yours. And in this workshop there are aspects of my analyses out of which I could readily be argued. When analysing a score, having access to realizations of the score in sound can be invaluable, even if the work is well known. Cook comments on the overriding interest of most analysts "in what gives unity and coherence to musical masterpieces, with the answers being sought mainly in the formal and harmonic structures of individual compositions" (4). Many of the works chosen for the analyses in this workshop are short and you can hear the over-riding structure when they are played in their entirety and their formal structure is outlined. There are two longer works from which excerpts will be drawn, and the overall structures will be described briefly.
Yet Cook also suggests that perhaps timbral structure and other musical parameters can be equally of interest and the focus of this workshop is on constructional, timbral and compositional devices, devices which can be a useful part of a student composer's musical toolbox.
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