Recommend me books about composition

[orangettecoleman]

I've been thinking about picking up a couple of books to help me conceptualize my compositions in a more interesting way. Usually I just think in terms of "well there'll be a droney part here and then it will go to a bunch of static after about 7 minutes and then there will be a field recording at the end". Aside from the many books available dealing specifically with the music theory aspect of composition (melody, harmony, etc), what would I want to look at to expand my ideas about compositional structure and help me come up with some more complex (but consistent) plans for compositions? What resources do non-traditional composers, such as "musique concrete" or spectral composers, look at when studying compositional structure? Thoughts?

[Dohol]

This is kind of a tough row to hoe, but it can be very helpful...



Unfortunately, I am an autodidact so I don't have a lot to offer..

I've always wanted to find a gold mine of information in a single volume but that's not anything I've ever found. Read everything you can find on composition and composers ( even Walter Piston's book on harmony, though it's as dull as a stone..).

Camp out in your local university's library ( that's what I did ) and read as much as you can..It's a never ending process.

[niwi]

want

[horaflora]

me too, especially after I've been playing with this new, more configurable version of iGendyn... would like a deeper understanding...
screen shot of some parameters:

[billygomberg]

me too, especially after I've been playing with this new, more configurable version of iGendyn... would like a deeper understanding...
screen shot of some parameters:

derailing the topic, but i love this app.

[horaflora]

further derailling, unthreading (or is the weave tighter?):

Have you seen his new one, Con:Cat?
http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/use ... phone.html

"Concat is a 'concatenative synthesizer' operating on live audio streams. The current sound input is matched to the best fitting stored audio in recorded buffers; for example, you can control playback of other sounds via your voice. The matching is based on four timbral features, and you can choose the size of the matched segment played back, from immediate small grains to larger segments. Concatenation comes from choosing lots of these grains one after another to make novel output sounds. This feature-based granulator lets you create up to five buffers of around 20 seconds each; try capturing your friends' voices, the sounds of your environment, and more... "

[billygomberg]

further derailling, unthreading (or is the weave tighter?):

Have you seen his new one, Con:Cat?
http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/use ... phone.html

"Concat is a 'concatenative synthesizer' operating on live audio streams. The current sound input is matched to the best fitting stored audio in recorded buffers; for example, you can control playback of other sounds via your voice. The matching is based on four timbral features, and you can choose the size of the matched segment played back, from immediate small grains to larger segments. Concatenation comes from choosing lots of these grains one after another to make novel output sounds. This feature-based granulator lets you create up to five buffers of around 20 seconds each; try capturing your friends' voices, the sounds of your environment, and more... "

textile metaphors ain't shit when i kinda need an iPhone to really rock Concat. ipod touch over here, dude.

[horaflora]

Curtis Roads - microsound

this has a good breadth of coverage, from synthesis technique to implementation (including thoughts on micro-macro structures and such)

[billygomberg]

but seriously - Feldman's Give Me Regards To Eighth Street is a fun collection that should help you "conceptualize" - there aren't any traditional composition lessons involved. and Morty is pretty funny.

there are some books by Schoenberg if you really want to work for it.

[Dohol]

but seriously - Feldman's Give Me Regards To Eighth Street is a fun collection that should help you "conceptualize" - there aren't any traditional composition lessons involved. and Morty is pretty funny.

"Give My Regards" is a wonderful book..

[niwi]

"Give My Regards" is a wonderful book..

i just bought this and am waiting for it to arrive.

[Devin_DiSanto]

If you can track it down, The Time of Music by Jonathan Kramer is worth browsing.

[hákarl]

I'm not sure how useful that Xenakis book is - It's one of those you can sort of eke out some stuff particular to Xenakis from it, but without a fairly good understanding of formal mathematics, it can be fairly baffling. For me, it was kind of interesting in so far as you get an idea of what Xenakis does to make his music, but I think it'd be difficult to get a broader application of it unless you wanted to do pretty much what he does. The electronics side of it is interesting, but as a lot of the technology is effectively obsolete, there's a limit to how much use that is. Having said that, it's definitely worth skimming through if you're interested in the man.

Unfortunately, I can't really think of a general composition book - stuff like Feldman's 'give my regards...' or Cage's Silence/ Year from Monday/ M are definitely worth picking up, but more as an insight into what they did, rather than to clarify one's own composition. I gave some of Schoenberg's writings a crack a while ago, and while I think there's a lot of interest there, I got a bit lost in what can often be quite dense music theory.

On the other hand, reading about how people approach music can definitely be very inspiring - I know that for me, Cage's Silence made a huge difference to how I think about music. In terms of conceptualisation of pieces, I've noticed that a lot of composers seem to take more ideas from outside of music than within - so maybe some more general philosophical/ crit theory books on aesthetics? Someone like Adorno or Badiou, perhaps?

[horaflora]

Just noticed that both Surgeon and Chris Watson mention being influenced by this book at an early age in seperate interviews in the Aug issue of the Wire... must be good? 1971... must be dated?

[niwi]

hard to say - if it focuses on technical details it may be dated, but if it focuses on composition then not necessarily.

[scøtt]

in this video here curtis roads talks about how 'education of a gardener' gave him ideas for composition and a book he's writing. specific segment at 13:30 but the whole thing is pretty great, including looking into his protools sessions, connecting the metaphor to his actual backyard garden and 'a student's piece of electronic music'.

[orangettecoleman]

That composing with tape recorders book looks fascinating. Unfortunately the used copies around are pretty pricey for an 80 page book, but I'll look around at the libraries... The main problem is that there are tons of books about the techniques of synthesis, but relatively few (that I can find) on how to structure a piece using such sounds, and in any case I'm not really using synthesis, but rather arranging samples of prepared guitar/field recordings and so on. I'm going to be ordering the Feldman book in any case, I've been meaning to do so for a while now.

Edit: I think I will be ordering that Curtis Rhoads book in any case... maybe it's time I got started with synthesis. Any opinions on the books by Eduardo Miranda, Heinrich Taube, or David Cope? I get the feeling that these are also more or less "synthesis techniques and applications" books, which I might find useful anyway (if the ideas for constructing pieces can be extrapolated to other sound sources)

[Herb Levy]

Back in the day, I found David Keane's Tape Music Composition (Oxford University Press) very useful & pragmatic. It's more generally about tape recorders than the Dwyer, and unlike that book doesn't describe any actual projects to try out, but it covers most tape techniques using one or more decks as well as mixing, signal processing, editing, etc.

It was published in 1980 &, if you're really interested in using tape recorders, there really haven't been a lot of advances since then. &, of course, most of the techniques can be used with digital recording systems, though some of the terminology is different.

The Keane book also seems to be somewhat cheaper than the Dwyer: by a little through various ABE Booksellers (cheapest Keane is roughly $36 compared with $44 for the cheapest Dwyer), by a lot on Amazon (several copies of the Keane listed at $22).

[orangettecoleman]

OK, ordered the Feldman, the Keane, the Curtis Roads, and the gardening book. Thanks for the advice! If there are any more suggestions I'm still listening, I'm not done ordering yet!

[ellipsis]

Trevor Wishart, On Sonic Art
A lot of the discussion is based on a contrast between traditional music theory and Wishart's own (slightly didactic) approach, but there's some valuable concepts in there.
Might be less of a revelation if you're not coming to it from a conventional composing background, though.