Drafted: Tuesday, March 11th, 2025, Revised and Published: Wednesday, March 12th, 2025.
Before devoting into Musical Forms, overwhelmed by understanding the subject technicality, I decided to take a pause, to consolidate and deepen my understanding of Composition.
As someone who lives in London, I spend the few early hours of every morning in commuting across trains. A spectrum of an old scene visited me today, took me back 20 years ago, when we (I & some of cousins) used to "play" on windows of red Toyota Cressida. Someone beating on the glasses, another singing with his (crappy, awful, poor, horrible) voice, enjoying the miserable we do!
Agreeing on the product or not, I can clearly now, saying, it was some sort of (Composition) and (Orchestration). There was a composer, conductor, and orchestrator.
A composer, who's hearing a momentum in his head, seeing colours in the atmosphere, drawing waves over the (void), with solidaring beats. He shaped all the directions, creating the moments, writing the scenes. He have something, trying to express it, with pure voice. Per his mood that day, the area will be charted. His lake of knowledge, tools, made the product as what it was. It wasn't bad, however, it was "an amateur" work, something intuitive, simple, from the pure soul.
Composition, relies on that amaturity. It actually loses its beauty when the composer drop it off. Over the time, when that young composer become older, he will discover much broader ways to express, new techniques, scales, pitches, forms. He overtime, will correct his mistakes, until perfoming his purification, justification, and satisfaction. This process, reminds me by what we call in mathematics (Developing the intuition / AKA. Reaching the Mathematical Maturity).
As someone who came from that area of experience, I can see no difference between Composition and Mathematical Work. Both, are trying to solve or generalize, with consistence, and harmonization, reduce, with repetition / re-evaluation. A contrast, exposure / exposition, resolution, and development. Both of them, you can't teach it intrinsic and core values, it comes with conscious and growth. However, if not sharpened with learning process, the needed time to reach an "acceptable" level would be centuries.
Yesterday, I was reading in Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, and this quote was make sense & justifiable for me:
Do you regard musical form as in some degree mathematical?
I.S. It is at any rate far closer to mathematics than to literature---not perhaps to mathematics itself, but certainly to something like mathematical thinking and mathematical relationships.(How misleading are all literary descriptions of musical form!) I am not saying that composers think in equations or charts of numbers, nor are those things more able to symbolize music. But the way composers think, the way I think, is, it seems to me, not very different from mathematical thinking.
I was aware of the similarity of these two modes while I was still a student; and, incidentally, mathematics was the subject that most interested me in school.
Musical form is mathematical because it is ideal, and form is always ideal, whether it is, as Ortega y Gasset wrote 'an image of memory or a construction of ours'. But though it may be mathematical, the composer must not seek mathematical formulae.
To reach that point of sharpness, the composer, need to be aware of the techniques, and methods. The approaches, and forms, how something like Appoggiatura creates satisfiable disruption, the easiness to follow the ABA form, with the right motives, and appropriate amount of it repetitions, to make a pleasant piece of music.
The Journey is Long, and Resources are Limited. The more you know, The more you can do with the less you have. Sometimes I feel it like chess, once you see a move you know it an opening for an offensive attack, easily you can respond.
So, when Newton said:
If I have seen further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants
He was right, and that why every composer should grasp his precedents. Even Beethoven, inherits some of Mozart's heritage.
See ya! Music Forms heavily technical, and I'm not ready for it yet.
© Random Thoughts, by Fares AlHarbi.