This blog began in the fall of 2008 as a forum for the discussion of issues relating to classical music composition. Although my primary objective has always been pedagogical – posts are generally aimed at students and others wishing to improve their composition skills – feedback from all interested readers, irrespective of their background, is welcome via the "post a comment" link at the end of each post.
I used to get my composition students at Memorial University's School of Music to write their own weekly blog posts reflecting on things that went well and things that were challenging in the process of creating their own compositions; links to these student blogs can be found at the bottom of the right-hand column, grouped by course number (Mu3100 is "Introduction to Composition," and Mu4100 is the follow-up to that course).
Enjoy your visit, and please leave a comment on anything that interests you, even if you are not taking my courses! I receive automatic notifications of all comments, irrespective of how old the original post is, so if you leave a comment, I will see it.
I am a composer of music for soloists, chamber groups, orchestra, voice, and electronics, as well as a guitarist and professor of Composition and Theory (since 1992) at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada.
I teach Composition, 2nd-year Music Theory (chromatic harmony and large form classical music), Renaissance Counterpoint, Baroque Counterpoint, and Music Technology. I have also taught Electronic Music, Orchestration, 20th-Century Techniques, Music History, Ear-Training, and Classical Guitar.
I welcome feedback from all non-spam bots! If you have any suggestions of topics you'd like me to cover in future posts, please let me know!
Many of my mentors and peers know that I love visual art and that I grew up drawing and painting in addition to playing piano. I almost always knew that I wanted to pursue music and become a composer, hence my decision to not go to art school, but since I started my BMus degree I have had fewer opportunities to create or immerse myself in visual art than was previously the case, and when I reached my third year I was beginning to realize how much I missed it. Since then, I started looking for pieces of art that were new to me while researching the ones I knew already to develop my understanding of them, which eventually got me thinking of how I might be able to incorporate my love of art into my compositional practices. As a result, I have changed how I write, listen and think about music.
Initially, I started looking at visual art differently; in addition to marvelling at a given work, I wondered what sounds would enhance the experience of looking at a particular piece of art. I then started researching composers who have have done something similar. I did not find very much information on composers writing music based on artwork and how they went about it, but I did learn that Debussy’s “La Mer” was based on Hokusai’s “The Great Wave of Kanagawa” and how he translated some of the elements in Hokusai’s work to music (more cool information on that here:
One of my favourite pieces is Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Poem, “Isle of the Dead, which was based on Brocklin’s work of the same name. The single-movement piece functions similarly to how I feel my work progresses, meaning it seems that Rachmaninoff saw the painting like it was a single shot in a movie and told the rest of the story he interpreted the painting to tell through his music. When Rachmaninoff saw this work for the first time, it was in black and white and was disappointed to find that the original was in colour. He later stated that had he seen the original first, he would not have written the piece.
Other Classical pieces that were inspired by art include “Danse Macabre” by Camille Saint-Saens, “Boticelli Tryptych” by Ottorino Respighi, and “Pictures at an Exhibition” by Modest Mussorgsky.
I think the idea of basing a compositional work on art extends beyond writing music inspired by pre-existing works. Shapes and colour are the two most basic elements in any piece of visual art and coming up with a conceptual arrangement of shapes and colours is equally valid as writing music based on a physical piece of art. Some composers experienced seeing shapes and colour while hearing music to various degrees including but not limited to Scriabin and Messiaen. They would frequently let their synesthetic sensations guide them in their compositional process; what keys they wrote in, what chords they used, etc. Most people don’t have synesthesia, but I think entertaining a frame of mind like that can be valuable to performers performing graphic scores.
Here
is another source that goes more in-depth about Messiaen’s experience with shape and colour.
I highly recommend exploring this topic more and maybe incorporating other art forms somehow into your work and see how it influences what you create. If you haven’t listened to these works yet, I encourage you to listen while looking at the artwork each piece is based on to see if you agree with how the composer interpreted each work and ask yourself if you would have done something differently and how.
This is a guest post by Jessica Ozon from W2024. Her plan was to write a work for choir and organ, and she started by doing research on works for this medium, looking to see what other composers have done, and perhaps finding some useable/inspiring ideas along the way.
She included many links, so please check these out if you have a chance!
Thanks, Jessica!
Some research/thoughts/questions for my organ and choir composition:
Lots of french organists of the 20th century were excellent improvisers because they considered this a very important skill. Some of Messiaen’s compositional techniques can also be heard in his improvising. https://youtu.be/SY7g0ULVl2I?si=zIlzLbCsP5uAr9S1 I think this is why many French composers like Messiaen, Dupre, and Duruflé have an improvisatory quality to a lot of their music.
Tournemire and Liszt - using chant to inform solo instrumental music, however, one is intended as a concert piece while the other is for liturgical use. How does this affect the way they express the meaning of the text without words?
Messiaen again: https://youtu.be/x0__tgrjTkc?si=6yhrJo6IWpI34pbo O Sacrum Convivium is a very early Messian piece, and the only work he ever published for liturgical use, although much of his work had religious themes. Both musical similarities and differences exist between this and his later organ music. Messiaen’s music really plays with time in an interesting way, which probably had implications for its spiritual/meditative quality. Notice the incredibly slow sections juxtaposed with incredibly lively passages in the organ work, and the unusually slow pace in the choral work
Durufle: I plan on setting the same text used here, I think it’s very beautiful and the chant has a simple, recognizable melody that makes it more accessible. I also think it shows some of the value in retaining use of Latin in music as Duruflé and Messiaen have done; “caritas” can translate to either “charity” or “love” yet does not exactly mean either of these things, and the exact meaning is thus lost in translations of this text. I think the consideration of the particular text being used for choral compositions is very important as small details such as this may change what we want to convey in the music.
Durufle tries to maintain the feeling of plainchant in this piece, with the harmony simply embellishing on the main melody. I want to explore other ways of doing this with a less traditionally tonal sound.
This is awesome, and shows some beautiful and unconventional ways of using the organ. Saariaho is great in general at showing new ways of creating expression and meaning in music, outside of the typical idioms used for these instruments.
Other composes to explore: Many English composers in the 20th century like Vaughn Williams and his contemporaries wrote organ and choral music, though not much of it can be called post-tonal. Nonetheless I think there’s interesting and uniquely modern harmonies to explore in works by these people, as well as learning from the “classical canon” composers who wrote for choir or organ, like Bach, Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vespers, etc.
To conclude: Organ repertoire and choral repertoire are both very varied. I think it’s near impossible to separate these mediums from the religious traditions they’ve been apart of, so it’s important to consider how composers in the past have expressed particular themes/emotions when writing for them. Much of the music above shows different ways of using time, timbre and register to create different effects and convey the meaning of texts. Composers also choose different methods of making their music suitable for different settings, whether that be a concert or for a church service of some kind.
Some students tell me that they are unable to leave comments on blog posts. They get a message saying something like: "You don't have access to this service. Contact your administrator."
This seems odd, but I think I may have a solution for you, courtesy of Emma Hamilton:
Log out of your MUN mail account (or log out of any MUN account, such as the one you use to get into BrightSpace). Basically, make sure that you're not logged into anything connected to MUN!
Sign into your Google account.
Go to my blog: https://clarkross.blogspot.com/
Go to the bottom of any post, and click the "comments" link; it tells you how many comments thete have been on that blog post, so it might say "6 comments," or any other number. That's what you click. Do not click the little mail icon next to the "comments" link; clicking on this icon lets you E-mail the blog post to someone, but that's not what we want.
That should take you to the page where you write you comment. It should say something like: Post a Comment On: → Music Composition Weblog ←
Please let me know if that worked.
If it didn't work, drop by my office and we'll try to figure it out.
My guess is that the cause of the problem is MUN's firewall, which prevents you from accessing potentially problematic websites. For some reason, attempting to leave a Blogger comment triggers this firewall.
In my previous post, I explored what is meant by "Pandiatonicism" and found that there appears to be no widely-agreed-upon standard definition of the term.
Today's post has examples of music that some have labelled as pandiatonic.
Unfortunately, most of the examples below for which pandiatonicism is claimed seem overtly tonal, albeit with very little chromaticism, which may be why some people claim them to be pandiatonic. That said, many of these examples have at least some chromaticism, but I don't consider that minimal use of chromaticism automatically excludes the passage in question from being considered pandiatonic.
I'll try to find more examples, ideally better ones, that make a stronger case for being pandiatonic, but for now, check these out. If you want to skip down to what I consider the best example, see Stravinsky's Sonata for Two Pianos, towards the end of these examples.
• Cited in: "Pandiatonicism." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 29 Aug. 2023. Retrieved 8 Feb. 2024
This shows no indication of being pandiatonic to me. It seems pretty strongly to be in C major, albeit with very little chromaticism. But the absence of chromaticism does not make a work pandiatonic. If it did, then simple nursery-rhyme tunes such as "Mary had a little lamb" would be pandiatonic, which they are not; they are tonal and diatonic.
Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953), Piano Concerto #3, I (1921)
• Cited in: "Pandiatonicism." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 29 Aug. 2023. Retrieved 8 Feb. 2024
This hints at pandiatonicism in the slow intro before switching to the faster material at rehearsal number 2 at which point it appears to be in C major for a few bars, after which it becomes more chromatic. Perhaps the intro is pandiatonic, but the rest of it isn't.
Aaron Copland, (1900-1990) Appalachian Spring (1944)
• Cited in: "Pandiatonicism." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 29 Aug. 2023. Retrieved 8 Feb. 2024
This has a 3-sharp signature and appears to be pretty unequivocally in A major. This work has lots of nice harmonies and key changes, but it does not appear to be pandiatonic.
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), Shrovetide Fair from Petrushka (1911)
This has a 1-flat signature, but chords aren't necessarily progressing as they would in functional-harmony, so this seems to be a better example of pandiatonicism than previous examples. However, it also has overtly tonal sections, such as the simple folk-like melody at rehearsal number 23.
Igor Stravinsky, Pulcinella (1920; the score is a piano reduction, but the recording is the chamber orchestra version)
• Cited in: "Pandiatonicism." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 29 Aug. 2023. Retrieved 8 Feb. 2024
I have always enjoyed this piece, but I see nothing in the score that suggests anything other than tonality. It is mostly an arrangement/adaptation of the music of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736; a tragically short life!) and several other composers. Click the link if you are curious to hear the original versions of the baroque music Stravinsky used. To suggest that this is pandiatonic is inexplicable to me, but possibly I am missing something.
Igor Stravinsky, Sonata for Two Pianos (1944)
This one! I consider this to be the best example of pandiatonicism on this page. For me, there are two criteria to establish pandiatonicism: (1) Can it be seen to be in a key? (2) Does it contain functional harmony? If the answer to either question is "yes," then it is tonal, not pandiatonic.
Claude Debussy (1862-1918): Preludes, Book II, no. 12: Feux d'artifice (Fireworks; 1913)
This is not claimed to be pandiatonic by any sources that I have seen, but perhaps it has sections that are? It introduces chromaticism that seems to be mostly consistent within sections, but the chromatic notes differ in different sections.
Claude Debussy: Preludes, Book I, no. 8: La fille aux cheveux de lin (The Girl with Flaxen Hair; 1910)
• Cited in: "Pandiatonicism." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 29 Aug. 2023. Retrieved 8 Feb. 2024
I posted an analytical essay about this piece back in 2009, but for our purposes the salient point is that it is not pandiatonic.
It uses tonality in somewhat unconventional way – The opening is based on a Gb pentatonic scale; the first cadence is IV-I in Gb (plagal cadences were relatively unusual in classical and romantic music, although plagal extensions, sometimes called the "Amen cadence," were more common), which establishes the initial home key as Gb. However, this is followed immediately by a passage (mm. 5-7) that ends with a perfect authentic cadence (PAC) in Eb (= VI in Gb), which is surprising, but this is followed by a passage that ends with another PAC, this time back in Gb. The V chord in this cadence (mm. 9-10) has chordal extensions of a 7th, 9th, and 11th, but it is nevertheless a PAC in Gb.
It also uses chromaticism in mm. 6-9. All of these factors – establishing Gb as the tonic key through a plagal and authentic cadences in the first 11 bars, and the use of chromaticism – make this a tonal work, not pandiatonic.
That said, these bars do have at least one element of pandiatonicism: There are 3rd-inversion dominant 7th chords on Gb and Ab in mm, 8-9 that do not resolve in a functional way (the second of these, the Ab dominant 7th, is followed by a Db dominant chord, making it a functional progression – V4/2 of V to V – but the voice leading is not functional; the 7ths don't resolve); these sonorities are used as colours, without regard for the need to resolve them in the traditional manner of classical tonal music.
I will periodically add more examples to this page. Please suggest other works that you think might be pandiatonic, and share your thoughts below in the Comments section!
The term "pandiatonicism" was coined by Nicolas Slonimsky in the second edition of Music Since 1900 (1938) to describe harmonic language that uses the notes of any diatonic scale in a non-tonal manner.
It is a somewhat problematic term for two reasons:
It is partly defined by what it is not: It is not tonal, despite being based primarily on the diatonic notes of any key or scale.
There appears to be no widely-accepted understanding of the term beyond acceptance of the idea that it involves almost exclusively diatonic notes; it is defined differently by different writers.
Regarding the first issue, let's explore how a composition can be based on the diatonic notes of a key or scale but not be tonal. I will suggest that the following conditions should apply:
It does not use functional harmony progressions, such as ii - V - I, IV - I, V - vi, etc., because these are the harmonic building blocks that establish a key in tonal music.
It does not follow the voice-leading conventions of tonality that apply to the resolution of tendency tones, which include:
Chord extensions: 7ths, 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths,
The leading tone in dominant harmony,
Suspensions and retardations,
The 5th of diminished chords.
The next two voice-leading practices are common in tonal music, but I don't think they apply to pandiatonicism:
The 6 & 4 of the cadential 6/4 (I don't see how pandiatonic music can have a cad. 6/4, since it is part of a progression that typically establishes a key),
Most chromatically-altered notes (this is irrelevant if only diatonic notes are used).
Can pandiatonic music have a tonic chord or tonic note? As you can see in the discussion below there is disagreement on this. My feeling is that it can, as long as it is not established by the means used in tonal music. Establishing a tonic note or chord through non-tonal means can be challenging, but it is not impossible
Another problematic aspect is that it is defined differently by different people. For example:
The Wikipedia article on Pandiatonicism states that "all seven degrees of the diatonic scale [are] used freely in democratic equality."
I believe that this idea came from Slonminsky (1938). I take this to mean that there is no hierarchy of diatonic notes and triads, unlike tonal music, in which different notes and triads often have specific roles to play, such as dominant-function chords (V, vii°), predominant-function chords (IV, ii), and tonic chords.
The composer in me finds this to be an interesting idea. The problem with this description, however, is that I don't think that many of the works cited as examples of pandiatonicism have this quality (democratic equality of all diatonic notes).
Richard Kostelanetz, in A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (2013, 465) writes: "The functional importance of the primary triads...remains undiminished in pandiatonic harmony." (Wikipedia says that this "appears to be quoting Slonminsky," FWIW.)
I find this an odd statement. How is music in which primary triads have undiminished functional importance any different from tonality?
On the other hand, Bryan R. Simms argues that "pandiatonicism does not project a clear and stable tonic" (Music of the Twentieth Century: Style and Structure (1986, 63-64).
This is closer to my understanding of pandiatonicism.
Also from Wikipedia: "Pandiatonic music typically uses the diatonic notes freely in dissonant combinations without conventional resolutions and/or without standard chord progressions, but always with a strong sense of tonality due to the absence of chromatics."
I agree with the everything in the above statement until the last part: "always with a strong sense of tonality due to the absence of chromatics.
Wait… what? There are two problems with this statement:
Tonality isn't defined by an "absence of chromatics." Almost all tonal music uses chromaticism, such as modulation, applied dominants, mode mixture, augmented sixth chords, etc., at least in classical and jazz music. "Chromaticism" comes from the Greek word for "colour," which conveys the implication that music without it is colourless.
If you play a random series of pointillistic white notes or white note clusters on piano, will it necessarily result in music with a "strong sense of tonality?" Tonality isn't just about the notes used in a passage of music; it's about the way those notes are used. The only way for music to have a "strong sense of tonality" is for it to be tonal, which usually includes chromaticism.
In Slonminky's 1947 edition of his Music Since 1900 he suggested that pandiatonicism can be considered to be "a diatonic counterpart of Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, whereby melodies may be made up of seven different notes of the diatonic scale, and then be inverted, retrograded, or both. According to this system, "strict pandiatonic counterpoint" may use progressions of seven different notes in each voice, with no vertical duplication" ("Pandiatonicism," in Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21 Jan, 2024).
This is an interesting compositional idea that might be fun to try, but I would suggest that almost no works that get cited as examples of pandiatonicism have this quality.
I will also suggest that Slonminsky was writing as an advocate for the concept of pantdiatonicism here, not as an impartial scholar making observations on existing musical practices. I'm not sure that he included any examples of diatonic serialism. This is not to suggest that such examples don't exist – Aaron Copland tried this, and possibly Stravinsky as well (I'll try to do some more research to find out more about this).
Here is my suggestion for composition students: I encourage you to try writing something that can be considered pandiatonic if the idea interests you.
However, given the fact that a universally agreed-upon definition of pandiatonicism does not exist, I would to suggest the following guidelines:
Avoid anything in melodic lines or harmonic progressions that suggests tonality.
Avoid establishing a tonic. Or if this is too disturbing, establish a tonic, but not by any method associated with tonality; for example, Ti-Do and So-Do, if supported by dominant-to-tonic (or dominant to sub-mediant) harmony, are overtly tonal and should therefore be avoided.
→ On the other hand, if Ti-Do is supported by non-tonic-to-dominant harmony, such as iii to ii7, or I7 to IV, it is available.
Aim to use all pitches of whatever scale you use equitably and democratically.
Triads may be used only if they do not progress as they do in tonal music. → See the Kostka & Payne chord progression chart below for a summary of how diatonic chords usually progress in tonal music.
Try to use non-triadic constructions as well, such as quartal and quintal harmony.
→ One challenge in using these types of harmonies is that, depending on what note you start on, you might end up with accidentals if trying to maintain a vertical structure of perfect fourths, such as C - F - Bb - Eb - Ab, etc. While occasional accidentals are fine in pandiatonicism, for the most part the objective is to avoid them. They are fine if required for modulations, however.
→ If you want to write quartal harmony using only perfect fourths and white notes (i.e., no accidentals), for example, you could build up from B: B - E - A - D - G - C - F. → If you want to try this with quintal harmony, build up from the last note above (F): F - C - G - D - A - E - B.
Give Slonminsky's serialist diatonicism a try if you wish.
You may find it challenging to write music you enjoy without borrowing common practices from tonal music; therein lies the reason tonal music is so widely embraced: Its practices have evolved over centuries to sound good to Western ears. We talk about Ti "wanting" to rise to Do in a V-I progression, or of a chord seventh "wanting" to resolve down by step to a consonance in the next chord, or a 4 "wanting" to resolve down to 3 in a 4-3 suspension, because these practices sound good or "right" to our ears, so writing tonal music in which these practices are not followed can feel very "wrong" to us.
(On a side note, I am curious to know if the tonal music practices that sound "right" to our ears have corollaries in music of other cultures, such as South-Indian classical music, or traditional Chinese music. Do they use anything like dominant-tonic harmony?)
For this reason, you may find it easier to write pandiatonic music that avoids triadic progressions, such as Slonminsky's serialist approach to diatonicism, or pointillistic music in which widely-spaced notes are distributed in unpredictable ways.
I'll stop here for now; I will post some links to pandiatonic music in my next blog post.
Please let me know your thoughts below in the comments section!
How diatonic chords in classical music usually progress: Chord-Flow Chart(from Kostka, Stefan M., and Dorothy Payne. Tonal harmony: With an introduction to twentieth-Century music. New York etc.: McGraw-Hill, 2009. P. 111):
Check out the next post, Pandiatonicism 2, to listen to various works that some have claimed to be pandiatonic.
You may also like these posts on Post-Tonal Harmony Ideas:
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