THE CRAFT OF MUSICAL COMPOSITION
This program is focused on teaching the craft of music composition in the context of contemporary concert music. What does that mean? Basically, that we will be writing music for real people playing real instruments (so think classical musicians performing on a concert stage).
THE CRAFT OF MUSICAL COMPOSITION
Track One is specifically designed to provide the experience and tools that a high-school age composer needs to develop in order to pursue future studies at the college level. This is a perfect course for someone preparing their composition portfolio for undergraduate applications. It is also perfect for the adult musician (professional or amateur) desiring experience and growth in their compositional craft. All participants in Track One will have their works performed by talented IU students in a live streamed concert. Hearing your music performed by real people is absolutely the best way to learn to compose!
Track Two is setup for those only wanting to take private composition lessons. This may include adults who would like to ease into composing without a public performance, or for younger composers just getting started.
Hindemith was born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, the eldest child of the painter and decorator Robert Hindemith from Lower Silesia and his wife Marie Hindemith, née Warnecke.[1] He was taught the violin as a child. He entered Frankfurt's Dr. Hoch's Konservatorium, where he studied violin with Adolf Rebner, as well as conducting and composition with Arnold Mendelssohn and Bernhard Sekles. At first he supported himself by playing in dance bands and musical-comedy groups. He became deputy leader of the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra in 1914 and was promoted to concertmaster in 1916.[2] He played second violin in the Rebner String Quartet from 1914.
As a composer, he became a major advocate of the Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity) style of music in the 1920s, with compositions such as Kammermusik. Reminiscent of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, they include works with viola and viola d'amore as solo instruments in a neo-Bachian spirit.[5] In 1922, some of his pieces were played in the International Society for Contemporary Music festival at Salzburg, which first brought him to the attention of an international audience. The following year, he began to work as an organizer of the Donaueschingen Festival, where he programmed works by several avant-garde composers, including Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg. In 1927 he was appointed Professor at the Berliner Hochschule für Musik in Berlin.[6] Hindemith wrote the music for Hans Richter's 1928 avant-garde film Ghosts Before Breakfast (Vormittagsspuk) and also acted in the film; the score and the original film were later burned by the Nazis.[7] The score was recreated by Ian Gardiner in 2006. In 1929 he played the solo part in the premiere of William Walton's viola concerto, after Lionel Tertis, for whom it was written, turned it down.
During the 1930s, Hindemith visited Cairo and also Ankara several times. He accepted an invitation from the Turkish government to oversee the creation of a music school in Ankara in 1935, after Goebbels had pressured him to request an indefinite leave of absence from the Berlin Academy.[10] In Turkey, he was the leading figure of a new music pedagogy in the era of president Kemal Atatürk. His deputy was Eduard Zuckmayer.[12] Hindemith led the reorganization of Turkish music education and the early efforts to establish the Turkish State Opera and Ballet. He did not stay in Turkey as long as many other émigrés, but he greatly influenced Turkish musical life; the Ankara State Conservatory owes much to his efforts. Young Turkish musicians regarded Hindemith as a "real master", and he was appreciated and greatly respected.[13]
At the same time that he was codifying his musical language, Hindemith's teaching and compositions began to be affected by his theories, according to critics such as Ernest Ansermet.[15] Arriving in the U.S. in 1940, he taught primarily at Yale University,[16] where he founded the Yale Collegium Musicum.[5] He had such notable students as Lukas Foss, Graham George, Andrew Hill, Norman Dello Joio, Mitch Leigh, Mel Powell, Yehudi Wyner, Harold Shapero, Hans Otte, Ruth Schönthal, Samuel Adler, Leonard Sarason, and Oscar-winning film director George Roy Hill. He also taught at the University at Buffalo, Cornell University, and Wells College.[17] During this time he gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, from which the book A Composer's World was extracted. Hindemith had a long friendship with Erich Katz, whose compositions were influenced by him.[18] Also among Hindemith's students were the composers Franz Reizenstein[19] and Robert Strassburg.[20][21]
In the late 1930s, Hindemith wrote a theoretical treatise in three volumes, The Craft of Musical Composition,[29], which lays out this system in great detail. He also advocated this system as a means of understanding and analyzing the harmonic structure of other music, claiming that it has a broader reach than the traditional Roman numeral approach to chords (an approach that is strongly tied to the diatonic scales). In the final chapter of Book 1, Hindemith seeks to illustrate the wide-ranging relevance and applicability of his system in analysis of music examples ranging from the early origins of European music to the contemporary. These analyses include an early Gregorian melody, and compositions by Guillaume de Machaut, J. S. Bach, Richard Wagner, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and finally, a composition of his own.
His piano work of the early 1940s Ludus Tonalis contains twelve fugues, in the manner of Johann Sebastian Bach, using all traditional devices like inversion, diminution, augmentation, retrogradation, stretto, etc., each fugue connected by an interlude to the next, during which the music moves from the key of the last to its successor. The order of the keys follows Hindemith's ranking of musical intervals around the tonal center of C.[30]
Alan Belkin taught musical composition at the University of Montreal for more than three decades. Thousands of students from around the world have used his free online music textbooks at www.alanbelkinmusic.com. His music has been performed in Canada, the United States, Japan, and Europe.
Studio composition at Purchase features a stellar faculty and graduate program, a finely-tuned curriculum, close associations with both a renowned classical conservatory and a vibrant jazz studies program, and a superior professional career location.
Many studio composition recitals feature multimedia collaboration with the other arts conservatories at Purchase College. Other recitals can occur at New York City clubs and concert venues, and in professional recording studios.
Take a listen to this Spotify playlist of compositions featuring alumni and current students of the Music and Technology Department, curated by Rebecca Haviland, co-head of the Undergraduate Studio Composition Department.
Western notated music has long been about the confrontation with the written page, thus the goal of the Composition Program is to train aspiring composers to hone their skills at presenting their musical ideas as clearly and efficiently as possible through written notation, and to broaden their creative horizons through the close examination of a broad range of musical repertoire, both Western and non-Western, embracing all eras.
Introductory courses in composition, technology, instrumentation/orchestration, counterpoint, and form during the first two years provide intensive training in the fundamentals of the craft of musical composition. These courses have a variety of instructional approaches, including seminar-style classroom instruction, frequent performance/critique sessions, and supplementary private lessons.
For their third and fourth years, composition majors receive private instruction in composition with the professor(s) of their choice, culminating in a senior-year recital consisting of 50 minutes of music. Additional courses available to composition students include advanced counterpoint, as well as electives in technology, jazz arranging and composition, choral arranging, music theory, and music history.
In addition to these core courses and electives, the Composition Seminar, open to majors in all years, is a free-ranging class that delves into specific issues chosen from a wide variety of compositional, historical, and aesthetic topics, informed by expressions of interest by current students.
How did Renaissance composers write their music? In this revolutionary look at a subject that has fascinated scholars for years, musicologist Jessie Ann Owens offers new and striking evidence that contrary to accepted theory, sixteenth-century composers did not use scores to compose--even to write complex vocal polyphony. Drawing on sources that include contemporary theoretical treatises, documents and letters, iconographical evidence, actual fragments of composing slates, and numerous sketches, drafts, and corrected autograph manuscripts, Owens carefully reconstructs the step-by-step process by which composers between 1450 and 1600 composed their music. The manuscript evidence--autographs of more than thirty composers--shows the stages of work on a wide variety of music--instrumental and vocal, sacred and secular--from across most of Renaissance Europe. Her research demonstrates that instead of working in full score, Renaissance composers fashioned the music in parts, often working with brief segments, according to a linear conception. The importance of this discovery on editorial interpretation and on performance cannot be overstated. The book opens with a broad picture of what has been known about Renaissance composition. From there, Owens examines the teaching of composition and the ways in which musicians and composers both read and wrote music. She also considers evidence for composition that occurred independent of writing, such as composing "in the mind" or composing with instruments. In chapters on the manuscript evidence, she establishes a typology both of the sources themselves and of their contents (sketches, drafts, fair copies). She concludes with case studies detailing the working methods of Francesco Corteccia, Henricus Isaac, Cipriano de Rore, and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. This book will change the way we analyze and understand early music. Clear, provocative, and painstakingly researched, Composers at Work: The Craft of Musical Composition 1450-1600 makes essential reading for scholars of Renaissance music as well as those working in related fields such as sketch studies and music theory. 041b061a72