Final Musical Composition, Part II

This composition exercise will be expanded into a new section 6.8, entitled something like “Creating Your Own Musical Composition, II.” In the Math & Music course at our university, this composition exercise has provided an enjoyable conclusion to the course. Students are assigned it at after finishing most of the book, including Chapters 3 and 6. The composition exercise does make use of the scoring software MUSESCORE, but we have found that even students who are not musicians are able to produce at least some elementary musical score (sometimes that involves just adapting their Composition Exercise, Part I, which is fine for non-musicians). Several of the musician students have remarked that they enjoy using MUSESCORE because it is free and reasonably flexible.

MUSICAL COMPOSITION EXERCISE II, FROM MATH &MUSICCLASS This activity involves using some of the mathematical ideas that you have learned in the class to create a new musical composition. Performing this activity will show that you have achieved transference of ideas from mathematics into ideas from music. I hope you have some fun creating your own music!

Use the scoring program we used in the class, MUSESCORE, to compose a short musical composition. Here is a brief tutorial on how to create scores with MUSESCORE: http://musescore.org/en/musescore-tour-create-sheet-music Even if you are familiar with other scoring programs, like FINALE, the instructor uses MUSESCORE. There- fore, it is required that you submit a score created with MUSESCORE, a *.mscz file. You should also submit a PDF file that explains the musical ideas you used (as in the ones described below).

Here are some ideas that you could use from the course (Chapters 3 and 6 of our textbook):

(1) Choose notes from major or minor chords within the key you are using. Also make use of some passing tones and/or neighbor tones.

(2) Use chord progressions. If you do, explicitly state what they are.

(3) Have separate melodic lines.

(4) Use sequencing and/or symmetry within each melodic line. Explicitly state where you are doing the sequencing.

(5) Use different rhythms for each individual voice.

(6) You could adapt your TONEMATRIX musical composition from earlier in the course, so that it uses a major or minor scale (rather than a pentatonic scale), and has more than two melodic lines.

You don’t have to use all of these ideas, but you should use some.

The ideas given above mostly relate to diatonic music. If you want, you could instead use ideas on serialism from Chapter 6. Create your own tone row and use it to develop melodic lines and harmony using a musical matrix. You should provide the musical matrix you are using, and also explicitly point out the tone row and its modifications using this musical matrix. You could also use serialist ideas for modifying the rhythm in the piece. In that case, you should also indicate the mappings used for changing the rhythm.