Often, you sit at the piano, just waiting for a creative input to work with. This is something you can use pretty well to construct something meaningful for your composition. You may start with some chords or some melody, it doesn't matter.
But it is also helpful at some point, to know at least intuively, how to structure your music. Let me explain this in case of the meoldy:
In my lessons at school I get some ideas just while teaching. Recently I was teaching the pentatonic scale, which is a scale based on five notes:
Pentatonic Scale on As:
That scale is used in asia, original black music culture and in indonesian slendro, for example , and is - of course - different from the Major and Minor scales we use in western musical culture. I don't know whether I decided to just use that scale for my composition or if I was inspired just by the scale itself to create something associated with asia, but finally the pentatonic scale turned out to be my melodic basis for my composition.
If you play those pentatonic scale, you will just associate it with some asian stereotype, which comes mostly from film-music industry. So it is often presented very silly and superficial, just think about the "Flohwaltzer" (Fled-Waltz), everyone can play just by using the black piano keys:
So that is where a creativ and meaningful input has to come to your mind in order to not just plagiate some less meaningfull stuff. In this case, this meant to me, to use the scale not too obviously and present it on a more subtile context and embeded in traditional form of western music culture. This seems much more suitable and honest for me, because I am, as a german, not nearly capable of composing original asian cultural music. My point of view more was a contemplative state and I was thinking about beautiful asian girls laughing, colourful clothes, ming vases and stuff like that. All this formed the musical parameters afterwards.
When you look at the melody, you will see, that I used a periodic form of 16 bars, combined with a developing theme, drawing the melody up slowly and build up some tension by first using four notes of the pentatonic scale, repeating that, split off that phrase into two motifs and deliver the last tone of the scale (f'') in the 13th bar as kind of climax, than coming down and closing that melody. I tried to visualize it here:
This melody is now a first part of my composition, which (by the way) I decided to compose in As-Major (As because of "ASian"). Mostly, musical form in western cultural music is based on the "Forma bi partita" (J.S.Bach) which is just a two-part form like A-B (with A repeated most times A-B(-A) )I decided to compose a contrastive part afterwards. This part is a little bit deeper, darker turning to minor and going down with the melody first, and then catching up again before all comes back to my pentatonic melody.
That's pretty much all as of now. I hope you found my information interesting, I will be happy to read your thoughts in the comment section. You may even consider to support my openmic-entry which you can find here:
