Back in February I devised a system, mostly for fun, to help me compose a little bit every day throughout March when I would be too busy for more involved composition work. To me, as I know it is to many others as well, composing is not only a skill you can learn, but also one that needs to be kept up, like cycling, running, or weight lifting.
As a versatile freelance musician, I do many kinds of professional music-related jobs, including several not specifically related to composing or arranging music. After a longer period without any composing, I often feel rusty and like I need to “get back into it”, which hopefully helps explain my athletic comparisons above.
Over the years, I have taught several composition students who complain about lacking inspiration to write music, and therefore wait for inspiration to strike before doing anything. This is – as I have probably argued at least once already on this very blog – a false albeit understandable assumption, that composition must follow inspiration. In fact, I have both heard from several colleagues and experienced first-hand that, on the contrary, composition can stimulate inspiration.
As for making it into a game, on the one hand, I admit to feeling a certain contempt toward the seemingly ever-present trend of gamifying our lives and thus try to resist it as much as I can. Nonetheless, on the other hand, something as innocuous as composing etudes should be reasonable to turn into a kind of game.
Also, there is 20th-century precedent for using the structure of games in music, notably the orchestral works “Duel” and “Stratégie” by Greek composer Iannis Xenakis. Simply put, both works are structured around a predefined ruleset where two ensembles, each with their own conductor, try to score points in the way the pieces are performed. Because they aren’t simply played from the first bar to the last, each performance is unique.
An oft-quoted example of using a system of indeterminacy such as this to compose music is American composer John Cage’s piano work “Music of Changes”. He wrote it using the ancient Chinese divination book I Ching to determine musical parameters instead of simply using his own aesthetic ideas, or by another word, inspiration.
These are also examples of what is called aleatoric music, so named after the Latin word “alea”, meaning a die. In other words – paraphrasing another stone-cold 20th-century classic – the art music credentials are strong with my little system.
More importantly, I am a firm believer in that composing music should (preferably, at least) be fun. Another idea behind my Etude Game was to de-emphasise the serious aspect of composing, that the resulting etudes needed to hold some great artistic or intellectual value or that I need to learn or develop something in particular in writing them. While there is absolutely a time and place for consciously practicing specific skills, the point with this particular exercise was simply to stimulate creativity. From that perspective, it was a real success!
I composed a total of 31 etudes in March – one every day – using my Etude Game. I constructed the system to be as easy to use as possible, with the simplest requirements. That’s why I went with regular six-sided dice, even though I myself own more specialised dice, like twelve-sided ones which could have been very useful. As a composition teacher, I have used similar ideas as these in my classes, so it felt natural to stick with a general purpose ideal.
If it piques your curiousity, please try the game out for yourself! And feel free to modify it to suit your needs. This is just one of many possible variants; you can pretty much make it as complex or as simple as you want. You could also create entirely new systems, either more general or more specific, such as for randomising a tone sequence or chord progression.
And finally, I really want to stress this once again: Don’t forget to have fun.
Game Board
Here is the game board. If you want to save and/or print your own copy of it, you can download it here as a printable PDF file:
The game board has six musical parameters that I chose in order to create a suitably constrained format for the type of etude I wanted to make:
- Instrument family – keyboards, woodwinds, strings, brass, mallets, and for number six, any combination of the above
- Number of instruments – between one and six of the above family or, in the case of keyboards, one or two players on the same or separate instruments
- Number of bars – rolling two dice, between two and twelve bars
- Metre – rolling twice to generate the two halves of the time signature
- Tonic – rolling two dice, corresponding with the chromatic scale, any tone between C# (1 + 1) and B (6 + 6) as the base tone for the mode
- Mode – six of the contemporary diatonic modes, paired with the above tonic as the base tone
Game Rules
Preparation
The setup process is simple. Roll one or two six-sided dice as prescribed for each of the six musical parameters on the game board, setting up the structure of the etude with the resulting values.
Instrument family allows for any combination within the family you roll, of the number of instruments rolled, with two exceptions: The keyboards family can be either one player on one instrument, or two players one the same or two instruments. Or, if you roll a six, you get to pick freely from all five instrument families.
For the metre, you roll separately for the number of beats and the note values, combining those into a resulting time signature.
Instead of a major or minor key signature you also roll separately for a tonic, or starting note, and then a mode, or a sequence of whole- and half-note steps. (The ionian and aeolian modes are identical to the regular major and minor scales, respectively.)
Composition
With the framework set up, the goal is now to simply compose something – anything. Go with the first idea that comes to mind, no matter what it is, and make something out of it. If you think you have no ideas, just write down a few notes and take it from there. Ideally, writing the etude should neither be mindlessly jotting down notes, nor fretting over the smallest choices.
To the extent that playing the Etude Game is an exercise, it is in affirming your creative intuition in a permissive, playful setting. While composition should take no longer than 20–30 minutes at most, there is no set time limit as that might induce stress which could in turn impede the creative process.
However, one could simply set up a timer to determine a fixed duration for the composition process. In that case, the timer should ring at least twice: once as a warning when only a few minutes remain, and once more when the time has expired.
My 31 Etudes
I have been posting my own etudes weekly throughout March. The last two etudes come late as I took a break from posting last week. I have, however, also compiled all 31 etudes in a ten-minute video where you get both the visual scrolling score and the audio together. The last two etudes, for March 30th and 31st, are also posted below, but most of all, please enjoy this collection of all my 31 March etudes!