understanding music composition

Music is, in its broadest sense, the organisation of vibrations in the air (aka sound). The human ear struggles to differentiate sonic events closer than 50ms together, and at around 20ms cannot differentiate at all. It’s for this reason that vibrations occurring at a frequency of 20ms or faster are perceived as a wholly different phenominon: pitch.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines composition as:

• a work that someone has written:
• the process or skill of creating a work
• the way that people or things are arranged in a work
  (e.g. in a painting or photograph)
• the parts, substances, etc. that a work (or ‘composite’) is made of:
  the composition of the atmosphere

It’s for this reason that even the term music composition can be somewhat vague as it can refer to all of the following:

• a piece of music
• the act of composing music
• the organisation/arrangement of elements within a musical work
• the individual elements within a musical work

If music is organised sound, then the composition process involves a multitude of decisions relating to how sounds are organised. These decisions are inherently interconnected, but in order to understand music compositon better, it’s often useful to look at these decisions in isolation.

But its this interconnectedness that makes music so fiendishly difficult to quantify (let alone study or teach in terms of effective musical composition). It’s impossible to categorise the multitude of interdepentent (or even co-dependent) gestures. Nevertheless, there is a somewhat aesthetic collegial nature to music, which makes seperation possible to an extent, at least so as to form an meaningful understanding of individual parameters, their roles, and how to better hone ones craft.

tempo, metre, groove, swing, duration, rubato

scales, keys, chords, cadence

riffs, motifs, hooks, figures, inflection/intonation, tessitura/range, articulation, dynamics, accents

form, repeats

instrumentation, timbre, range, dynamics texture, timbre, instrumentation, articulation, envelope, balance, dynamics