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up or down the mountain (hopefully along with the lovely Samantha). And just as in life, if you move your home, it is quite dramatic. That is called a ‘key change’. If you listen to Stevie Wonder’s ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’, you will hear him change the key of the piece at the end.

      What is a composer?

      Speaking of Stevie Wonder, why is it that he is mostly called a songwriter, or someone who writes great tunes, but Haydn is called a ‘composer’? Composition is the art of organising sound in time. I’m being that vague because there are composers such as John Cage (1912–1992), who wrote a piece called 4’ 33” which is entirely silent. Yes, silent – except it isn’t really, because although the performer is told not to make any sound, it makes you realise that there is always some sound going on, even in a room full of people trying desperately not to cough, which I think was Cage’s point. Next time you are in a ‘silent’ place, count the number of sounds you can hear. You’ll be amazed. (In December 2010 the work reached number 21 in the pop charts as a protest purchase by people angry at Simon Cowell’s X-Factor machine.) Another of Cage’s pieces involves only metal instruments and it sounds much like my attempts at cooking. So in the end there are as many strange examples of what people define as music as there are examples of what people consider to be art.

      In the traditional sense a composer is somebody who writes down notes for other people to play. Sometimes composers imagine the notes in their head and then pour them out on to paper. Mozart was said to have been able to do this, as was the French composer Ravel (1875–1937), who wrote the famous Boléro, until he suffered from a degeneration of his brain which tragically left him unable to put pen to paper, a condition known as agraphia. ‘The opera is in my head,’ he said. ‘I hear it, but I will never write it down.’¹ Many people have music inside them, but it takes great discipline and skill to be able to translate that on to the page for somebody else to play and it takes years of practice to write it down in such a way that you can have it played exactly as you imagined.

      Not all composers can just put it straight on to the page like that. In some cases, composers use a piano to work things out, although some composers claim this makes what they write sound like piano music – rather than, say, a flute piece. If you are writing for a flute, they say, it’s better to imagine the sound of a flute playing than to listen to the sound of a piano impersonating the flute. Having little pianistic ability is not necessarily a block to becoming a composer: Irving Berlin, the great American song-writer who gave us ‘White Christmas’ and ‘How Deep is the Ocean’, was famously bad at the piano and would only play the black notes. ‘The key of C,’ he said, ‘is only for people who study music.’² (You get the key of C if you play on the white notes.) He even had a piano made with a special lever to change keys.

      Some composers are professional musicians, some of them are also conductors and others just do it in their spare time. There is no one rule. Composers are often consumed by their desire to write music; some are meticulous about detail, concentrating on a small output, while other composers are prolific, producing works to order. Henri Duparc (1848–1933) was so self-critical that he destroyed most of his own compositions, leaving only thirteen songs with which he was satisfied. Compare that to the output of Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) who wrote 106 symphonies.

      Recent technological advances have meant that many composers now use computers to print the music physically, a process that took hours in the past. Preparing 100 parts for the musicians can now be done at the touch of a button and the computer even allows the composer to hear a version of their score as they are composing. How different from when Bach was writing his music for the weekly church services in Leipzig from 1723 to 1750. He would only have a week to compose, write, prepare parts and then rehearse an entirely new work. Imagine what a computer could have done for him! I’ve heard musicians complain that computers lead to a lack of rigour in the writing of scores as young composers become lazy and allow the computer to do too much of the work. I believe the same is said of university essays, many of which have been copied from the internet. Either way, we have come a long way from quills, parchment and candlewax.

      As for how composers choose those notes, the techniques are almost as varied as the musicians themselves. People have used maths, chance, improvisation, philosophical schemes and systems galore to create new sounds and musical ideas. Thankfully a lot of the process remains mysterious. As film-maker and scriptwriter David Mamet once said when asked where his ideas came from, ‘Oh, I just think of them.’

      I’ll talk about how composers write melody and harmony, along with how they structure their work, in later chapters.

      How strange, the change …

      Musicians always talk about ‘major and minor’. What are they? How do I know if a piece is ‘minor’? Firstly there’s an important distinction to be made between ‘a major work’ or a ‘minor work’ and pieces in a major or minor key. Major/minor has nothing to do with importance. It’s about the musical character of the piece. You can have C major and C minor, just as you might have ‘Gareth cheery’ or ‘Gareth contemplative’. Simply put, pieces in ‘major keys’ are more sunny and bright, those in a ‘minor key’ tend to be more moody and dark.

      These aren’t random associations but they are reinforced by the music we are used to hearing. Minor keys sound more unsettling than major keys because they contain barely perceptible dissonance (notes that clash). To the untrained ear this is hard to hear but without going into the science of harmonics (and feel free to look into this yourself) I think that’s really all that is necessary to understand at this point.

      

Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, first movement – minor key

      

Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major, first movement – major key

      Who decided which instruments made up an orchestra?

      Nobody sat down and planned the orchestra, and even now it’s not absolutely fixed. Each time a composer writes a piece they are at liberty to use pretty much whatever instruments they like (within reason and subject to the confines of budget: those cannons in the 1812 Overture aren’t cheap!) The orchestra is like a greatest hits of the instrumental world, because there have been countless instruments created in the history of music but the orchestra is a condensation of all those variations into the best modern examples.

      A large modern symphony orchestra will have a certain number of musicians in its employ: on average about 60 strings, 13 woodwind, 12 brass and some percussionists. Music from earlier periods used fewer instruments; conversely, modern composers can use an extremely large number (more than 100). For large-scale works this orchestra might employ ‘extras’, such as a piano or harp, that aren’t used by every composer in every piece, or something more exotic such as an electric guitar, saxophone or theremin (an eerie electronic instrument popular in 1940s–1960s sci-fi and mystery films such as Spellbound and The Day the Earth Stood Still).

      Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, ‘Symphony of a Thousand’, uses a huge orchestra and is only performed on special occasions. Its subtitle is due to the huge personnel required to mount a performance. This is the apotheosis of the nineteenth-century orchestra.

      SYMPHONY OF A THOUSAND

piccolo	celeste
4 flutes	piano
4 oboes	harmonium
cor anglais	organ
4 clarinets	2 harps
bass clarinet	mandolin
4 bassoons	strings Скачать книгу В начало < 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 > В конец