What makes your music yours?

Started by c#minor, January 13, 2008, 08:04:07 AM

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c#minor


To better explain my question,

What are the little things that you always put in your music that gives it "your" characteristic sound?


I always roll of the flat 4th to the 5th, i frequently use fully diminished chords and rarely use a half diminished. I start the melody on the 5th very often. When writing in major i love adding the flat 6th in the melody to give it a "minoresk" sound. 

I also implement other styles in almost all of my music but that had more to do with my lack of maturity as a composer rather than stylist writing.

hornteacher

I often use the flat major seventh chord as an unexpected substitute for the dominant.

I also tend to use melodic lines that can be turned into canons and fugatos easily as I like to do that a lot.

johnQpublic

I'll let some future theorist figure out my "isms".  >:D

karlhenning

Quote from: hornteacher on January 13, 2008, 04:08:47 PM
I often use the flat major seventh chord as an unexpected substitute for the dominant.

It took me a long couple of seconds to make that out, as "major seventh chord" means something different than I understand you (or imagine that I understand you) to say.

You mean the major triad of the flatted seventh degree, right?  That's borrowed from the modes, and has been one of the expected substitutes for the Dominant, since the mid-19th century, you know  8)

greg

For me, it varies from work to work...... my op.1 uses a lot of what is it?.... parallel? chords.... some wholetone stuff, op.3 uses counterpoint exposed by percussion (snare drum) and then developed (or at least restated) by flute and transformed into a melody, for example. And now i'm trying to work with a more concentrated, less rhythmic, more dramatic late Romantic style

hornteacher

Quote from: karlhenning on January 15, 2008, 06:11:05 AM
You mean the major triad of the flatted seventh degree, right? 

Right.

Quote from: karlhenning on January 15, 2008, 06:11:05 AM
That's borrowed from the modes, and has been one of the expected substitutes for the Dominant, since the mid-19th century, you know  8)

Oh, I know.  I don't claim to have invented the technique, I just like the sound of it and therefore use it a lot in the concert band music that I compose.

karlhenning

Quote from: hornteacher on January 15, 2008, 03:50:21 PM
Oh, I know.  I don't claim to have invented the technique . . . .

;)

Nothing wrong with working with the material you like.  Heck, that's a cadential formula I've used myself.

Maybe I picked it up from "Girl, You Really Got Me Now"

hornteacher

Quote from: karlhenning on January 15, 2008, 05:38:52 PM
Maybe I picked it up from "Girl, You Really Got Me Now"

Shhhh.  Don't give away our secrets.  ;D

The Emperor

Because i write it, it's mine!

Anyway, i don't know, i tend to write "moody" stuff,
Normaly do the melodies starting in the fifth aswell, tend to play often octaves in the melodies(how original!).

Lately i've been getting a bit more into jazz, so in the last piece, i used a lot of 7th chords, and really big chords.

Anyway i which i could explain better, i just write what comes out.

mikkeljs

It always represents a double fractal common value in a quintic complex. :)

greg

Quote from: mikkeljs on January 17, 2008, 09:34:21 AM
It always represents a double fractal common value in a quintic complex. :)
i wonder how that sounds.....

mikkeljs

Quote from: 僕はグレグ (Greg) on January 18, 2008, 03:24:41 PM
i wonder how that sounds.....

My latest pieces was some inventions for viola. The first one was most like Mahler, the second like american minimalism, the third like Salieri on a bad day (as my teacher said ;D).

lukeottevanger

Quote from: mikkeljs on January 19, 2008, 01:12:16 AM
My latest pieces was some inventions for viola. The first one was most like Mahler, the second like american minimalism, the third like Salieri on a bad day (as my teacher said ;D).
]

So if we find the common denominator between those three, that's what the double fractal common value in a quintic complex sounds like?  ;) ;) ;)

mikkeljs

Quote from: lukeottevanger on January 19, 2008, 02:49:27 AM
]

So if we find the common denominator between those three, that's what the double fractal common value in a quintic complex sounds like?  ;) ;) ;)

Something like that.  ;D  This is the constructed model, I have come to 1.5 years ago. I always thought I would be an completely open minded composer with an interrest to explore all styles and forms, never limiting myself aesthetical. I think the world yet outsite your work is naturally interresting to a composer, since composition in itself comes from an interrest in something. And I also think a universal musical ( =unlimitted ) view brings us closer to the true aesthetic, if any. At least that´s what have happened to me, and the model, which I have tried to describe as precisely as I was able to, is a real mess of a construction, which is very vierd.
Every time I start all over, I come to the same model, in music as well as in life. I have tried daily for 1.5 year to imagine how to critizise the model, but without succes.

rappy

Concerning my composition style, people always tell me that it sounds a lot like Prokofiev or Schubert. Dunno why. Maybe it's because of melodical gift. I could never imagine trying to "find" a theme/melody by ratio (like Beethoven (often) did: experimenting by placing intervals in different orders etc.) - it's either there and I use it, or it's there and I round it up. It's a bit like what you do when you're improvising.
I think Schubert and Prokofiev did the same, other examples would be Tchaikovsky and Mozart, or Mendelssohn. I think that's why their thematic material is so very different to for example Beethoven's or Brahms'.

mikkeljs

Quote from: rappy on January 19, 2008, 05:22:55 AM
Concerning my composition style, people always tell me that it sounds a lot like Prokofiev or Schubert. Dunno why. Maybe it's because of melodical gift. I could never imagine trying to "find" a theme/melody by ratio (like Beethoven (often) did: experimenting by placing intervals in different orders etc.) - it's either there and I use it, or it's there and I round it up. It's a bit like what you do when you're improvising.
I think Schubert and Prokofiev did the same, other examples would be Tchaikovsky and Mozart, or Mendelssohn. I think that's why their thematic material is so very different to for example Beethoven's or Brahms'.

So perhabs experimental composers can result, that their music sounds less melodically perfect or maybe sound even uninspired? Interresting thought!
I generelly support the experimentation, and many composers like to do it. But I never do it my self!

But are we talking experiments or calculating? Because that´s different. I have written very melodic pieces, that was almost pure mathematics from the start, and in the beginning of the composition process, I did not have a clue about any of theise beauty melodies, but only a strong intuitive feeling. The finish piece (invention nio. 1 for viola) sounded like Mahler, and my composition teacher loved it, but claimed, it was too traditional (but he also hate everything written before 1900).

By the way, Rappy, I think you could get an interresting talk with a freind of mine, a composer that writes very neo-classical, very much sometimes! He has the same composition teacher as I had, and there is a conflict since they are extremely different. I recall, that you also write neo-classic stuff.