PhysMuse

This assignment from the How to Write Music course from ThinkSpace Education was about writing melodies and fitting them together with a harmonic progression.

This was an interesting module looking at the idea of developing motifs to create melodic lines and how to fit harmonic progressions to melodic lines given the case when your initial idea is a melodic one.

This module started with the idea of creating a motif and then developing using such techniques as integration, transposition, evolution, expansion, variation, reflection, and reduction again not belaboring the heady depths of things like inversion, retrograde, retrograde inversion, augmentation, diminution and the likes. Quick methods to get you composing.

I liked this approach a great deal and it feels a little like putting constraints on things to force you to think about what you have and what you can do with an idea without getting overwhelmed and thinking you need to restate the motif in twenty different ways.

The module also dealt with the idea of micro-structure as in the structural development of a motif into phrases rather than the idea of macro-structure dealing with longer sections of a piece,

There were many examples included and analyzed which always makes it easier to understand the concepts and goals.

Finally the module looked at adding harmonic accompaniment and progression to the melody line and determining which chords to use.

As you can no doubt guess the assignment consisted of looking at creating melodic ideas and developing them and adding harmonic accompaniment to them. I shall go way and do that now.