# Oral composition, traditional music, and using oral composition in classical music



## ZJovicic

While it's true that there are many crappy and kitschy folk songs, especially in pop-folk combinations and modern derivations of folk music, when it comes to authentic traditional music it's almost always high quality and artistically important and genuine.

Yet, most of the time creators of those songs were anonymous, often illiterate, and without a day of formal music education.

So I guess the process of music composition for them was something like this:

step one: learn dozens or hunderds of similar songs
step two: think of a simple new melody, in similar tradition like the songs that you know
step three: sing it many times, each time elaborating, adding complexity, developing, improvising, subtracting anything that's superfluous, until you get it just right

And that's it, now you have a new song!

I think this method of composition has certain advantages:

1) you're unlikely to create a confusing incoherent song, because the very fact of keeping it in your memory requires it to be sufficiently comprehensible and meaningful because otherwise you'd forget it. When you compose by writing, on the other hand, you can add much more "violence" and artificiality to your compositions, as the paper, unlike your memory, can handle anything

2) it's more intimately connected to the wholeness of your mind, it's in a way holistic, more unified... because you're able to mentally, just in your mind, without paper, process the whole composition, instead of just working on parts separately, like in written work... Yes, you can work separately on parts of the composition even if you're not writing it down, but it's more difficult and the fact that you keep the whole thing in your mind makes you less likely to create disunited work whose parts have nothing in common with each other

3) you can play with (a)tonality but there's some limit to it... even if you entered atonal territories the need to remember all of it in your mind would force you to make it more meaningful, to connect the dots inside the work

So the question now is, can classical composers incorporate oral composition techniques in their work? Perhaps by first composing the whole work in their mind without writing, and only then, when they have finished the mental work of composition and have a complete work in their mind, writing it down.


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## millionrainbows

ZJovicic said:


> So the question now is, can classical composers incorporate oral composition techniques in their work? Perhaps by first composing the whole work in their mind without writing, and only then, when they have finished the mental work of composition and have a complete work in their mind, writing it down.


Interesting ideas. I think "oral" (I prefer "aural") music is not written down because it is performed. The performances are where the development of ideas takes place. This is very similar to jazz; Coltrane will state the melody "head" of "My Favorite Things" and then improvise on it. His improvised performance, and the ideas contained therein, are what we are interested in.


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## ZJovicic

I said "oral" because I was at first focused on singing... but yep "aural" or even "mental" could describe it better.


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## Nate Miller

well, I play a number of works that are based on themes from folk songs, and even more that are based on nationalistic themes. Nationalistic music was pretty popular in the Napoleonic Era

I also play American bluegrass and Irish traditional music, so I have an affinity for folk music.

I've been playing a set of Airs on National Themes of Ireland by Mauro Giuliani, as well as his potpourri of Roman themes. the thing I like about his settings are that they are not purely settings of the tunes, but rather episodic works that weave the themes through them.

when I play Irish music there is a tradition of playing variations, too, which surprisingly enough is rather similar to your system there. First time you play a tune, play it pretty strait, then add and embellish each time by. Over time and playing a tune repeatedly, you get a sense for what works and what gets in the way


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## EdwardBast

The answer to your question is that "oral" tradition style composing has been a standard way of working in classical music for centuries. It's called improvisation. Beethoven, Mozart, and anyone named Bach, for example, was a consummate improvisor. For any composer skilled at the keyboard, it is an efficient way to generate music. The difference between this oral tradition and folk traditions is that these guys could improvise complex structures with wide-ranging modulations (or even fugues) and create variations on the spot. How did they do this? 

step one: learn dozens or hundreds of similar fantasies, sonatas, preludes, fugues or variations.
step two: think of new material in similar tradition like the fantasies, sonatas, preludes or fugues that you know
step three: play through it many times, each time elaborating, adding complexity, developing, improvising, subtracting anything that's superfluous, until you get it just right.
step four: write it down. Alternatively, one can write down a few bits as one goes.

Generally, these composers had great memories, in part because having a strong theoretical vocabulary makes it easier to remember complex ideas. One could borrow your concluding paragraph and write: 

Can classical composers incorporate oral composition techniques in their work? Yes, by first composing the whole work (for short piano pieces and the like) or a syntactically complete portion thereof, at the keyboard, and only then, when they have finished the mental work of composition and have a complete work (or unit thereof) in their mind and under their figures, writing it down.


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