Writing pitches isn’t the same as writing words. The approach is drastically different, especially when writing historical fiction. You’ll read pages upon pages of facts. You’ll log them down for future use. Then you start to write. You look at the facts. You consider the scene or situation  you’re writing about, and you back in your chair and stare - at something. Since I write in my studio, sometimes I stare at the monitor. Other times I look out the window and stare at a squirrel. Or I’ll go do something useful and non-artistic like go wash the dishes.

All the while, I’m running the story through my head, visualizing it, and writing dialog. When I’m settled with it, I go back to the keyboard and start writing.

You can do all that work and only come up with one good sentence. Or maybe a good paragraph. Or if it’s a good day, a few good pages with really snappy dialog.

Music doesn’t work the same way other than that you do think about what you’re writing and you do mull it over, especially if you have time to write and you’re not under a whip cracking deadline.

For the past couple of days I’ve been transitioning back to writing notes. It’s not been as easy as I thought it would be. So to get back into the groove of writing pitches, I’ve been working on a project I started for my counterpoint class called Variations on a Theme NOT by Handel. It’s a 12-bar theme in Bb. And even though the blues operate on a 12-bar structure, it’s not a blues. Excuse me, it ain’t a blues.

The idea is to push the theme with basic counterpoint to demonstrate to students the amount of options they have with a single theme, starting by continually rewriting the bass line and so, creating new harmonizations of the same melody.

That’s the first stage.

NOT By Handel starts on the pitch D above high C (a pitch a soprano can easily knock out, but one that an amateur alto might have to stretch for) and ends a major third lower on the Bb.

This provides some rather interesting harmonic possibilities.

In the style taught by Johann Joseph Fux, my D can be part of three triads: Bb Major, D Min, and G Min. Or as a jazzer might appreciate, Ionian, Phrygian and Aeolian.

Oh the melody stays the same
While the bass changes the game

What a clever lyricist to come up with such an astute musical observation.

“Thank you!” I say to myself.

Well, no matter how self-congratulatory it is, it’s true. You can keep the melody the same, and by shifting the bass line into different modes, you change the feel of the theme and what it communicates.

Change can be dramatic or subtle.

Of course, the bass line is just part of the story. The next action is most critical - selecting chords that go with the bass line and melody. Now in this style, for now, you’re restricted to triads. Take, for example, the pitches G and Bb. Since you’re restricted to triads in the diatonic key, there are only two choices. The G-Bb team can either be part of a G Minor triad or an Eb Major Triad.

Heavens to Mergatroid! Only two choices!?

Yes, but it’s ample. Just this simple restriction in 12-bars will easily yield at least dozen different options - again, same bass line, same theme, but different chord choices.

Each will make its own statement. Some with elegance. Others rather klutzily.

Sometimes a klutz is just that. A klutz. A composer can write himself into a corner just the way a prose writer can. As with words, so with pitches and lines.

Sometimes some ideas just don’t lead anywhere. And when that happens - erase. Or start again with a clean sheet of music paper, and keep your un-child for later examination.

This process allows for the wedding of theme, bass line and harmony - without a pre-nup.

Once you’ve completed a series of contrapuntal magnum opai (or is it opuses?), go to lunch. Seriously. Leave the piano (or the electronic keyboard where I mostly work) and befriend a banana. Walk outside, and if you’re not in L.A., breathe deep. Get some real air in those lungs. Shake your head. Jump up and down. Do something so that everyone on your block knows that you’re creative.

There’s a valid reason for this. A recording engineer I know says that by going outside, you “clean” your hearing in a way similar that eating certain types of food at a great dinner cleans your palate before the next course.

It’s true. A little break like that, especially going outside, resets the inner ear so that when you sit down and replay what you just wrote, you’re more much more objective about it.

Here, I believe, is yet another difference between a composer and a prose writer. A prose writer will often have an editor to review the manuscript. The composer has himself, unless he’s fortunate as Gustav Holst was to have Ralph Vaughan Williams as a best friend, so that the two could send their manuscripts back and forth for honest critique without the fear that one would steal what the other had written.

If you lack such a relationship, it’s only you. So you learn to be objective and not to fall in love with your notes.

As you play through them, you’ll find one or possibly more to your liking that you can do something with. If your harmony is in decent shape, and you know your orchestration devices, you can take this first stage theme and variations and score it with integrity.

If you’re fortunate enough to have some decent orchestral sample libraries, you’ll put some early effort in and discover just how far two lines can go in an orchestra. They can actually go quite far.

That’s because you have

1. The melody
2. The bass line
3. The harmony

From these three basic elements you can have sustained harmony following the harmonic rhythm of what you created, and if your theme is pretty good, you can also develop the theme, too.

This, of course, is the old way. But it works pretty good.

The newer way is to just create your theme, harmonize the melody, and then work out the bass line. Then reharmonize the melody and rework another a set of bass lines.

I switch between the two depending on the writing situation. But of the two, I tend to like the “older” method the best because in the end I find it yields more interesting choices to with from and ultimately, to score from.

At any rate, I find the process and the discipline reinvigorating. And when no one is looking, I occasionally drop in a chord from another mode.

Just to stir the juices, of course.

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