This music composition course spotlights a very diverse pool of creative artists, from James Brown to Johannes Brahms, Sting to Herbie Hancock, and from Bach to Beyonce. You will complete exercises that result in short work samples that reinforce the processes you are learning—exercises that are not driven by stylistic constraints or specific harmonies, but by sets of parameters intended to guide the creative process. Upon completion of this course, you will have learned the tools and methods necessary in helping to harness your creativity.

By the end of the course, you will be able to:

• Generate templates for sketching out ideas
• Practice options and strategies for composition beginning with a bass progression
• Use rhythmic patterns to help generate musical ideas
• Evaluate options for harmonizing music or creating a harmonic progression
• Employ methods for expanding harmonic progressions
• Identify strategies for creating effective transitions within a piece
• Make aesthetic and practical choices about instrumentation
• Apply self-evaluation of work and process

Syllabus

Lesson 1 Basic Course Premises/Establishing a Baseline

Lesson 2 Overview of the Compositional Process

Lesson 3 Project Decisions and Templates for Sketching

Lesson 4 Composing “From the Bottom Up”

Lesson 5 Composing “From the Top Down”

Lesson 6 Using Rhythm as a Source

Lesson 7 Creating and Expanding Harmonic Progressions

Lesson 8 Developing Melodic Materials From a Harmonic Progression

Lesson 9 Conceiving Form

Lesson 10 Transition

Lesson 11 Orchestration and Arranging

Lesson 12 Final Project

Requirements

Prerequisites and Course-Specific Requirements