Do your research before composing

Whenever I write a piece of music for a new ensemble I do my research beforehand. By doing my research I mean finding scores I like and pieces that sound good to me. I look for music that’s written for the same ensemble that’s written in a way that I want to emulate. If I can find a recording and a score I’m set. I’ll listen through the piece and look at how that composer achieved the sounds and textures they did and how they used the ensemble.

When I wrote my string quartet titled “T(h)e R(ab)b(it).” One of the things I did before even starting to write the piece is listen to a ton of string quartets. I wanted to make sure I did my homework beforehand.

And it helped.

It gives you an idea of how other composers have used the ensemble and what sounds they’ve used. This will help you figure out how you want to use the ensemble and what sounds and ideas you want. Some ways of writing may be fairly common for that ensemble while other ways of writing may not. Whatever it is, knowing more about how music for that ensemble has been written will just give you a fuller idea of what that ensemble can do.

It also gives you an idea of what the players will likely be used to playing if they play in similar ensembles often. While that point isn’t a big deal it is helpful to know what ideas may be a little awkward or may give the players a little trouble before rehearsal.

Specifically for string quartets, it gave me an idea of how composers used only four instruments, two violins, viola, and cello to create a piece of music. Because I’d studied orchestral music mostly it also gave me an idea of what types of techniques were commonly used in string quartets as opposed to orchestra.

In an orchestra there’s a section of violin players, but in a string quartet there’s only two, and often they’re playing two separate parts.

These are two distinct sounds, and while there aren’t techniques that sound bad in one versus the other, the techniques can sound quite different. You get much more bow sound and rasp from a solo player. You get a smoother sound from a section. Sections also often sound a little warmer than solo strings.

So hearing these two types of writing is useful. It was useful to see the writing styles. The string quartets had much more elaborate counterpoint than many of the orchestral pieces by the same composers. Maybe I managed to only find string quartets that included more elaborate counterpoint, but that seemed to be a commonality among all of them.

But it makes sense because in a string quartet the array of sounds available to you is less than with a full orchestra. You only have four instruments and only three unique instruments (because you have two violins). They’re also instruments that are fairly similar sounding (as opposed to trumpet versus flute). So creating interest within those constraints may lead to using something like counterpoint in a different way.

I did notice some similarities though. Many of the string quartets passed the melody around between the instruments, much like composers will do with melodies in an orchestra. And other things like rhythms, melodies, and harmonies were used in similar ways.

So do your research ahead of time.

I did the same thing before writing my album “Expanding (An Electric Symphony).” I found a whole bunch of electronic albums and listened to them. For these I couldn’t find scores because those didn’t exist but I made sure I listened to them as closely as I could and I even learned a few parts on piano. That way I could learn how different producers used the sounds and put them together in their music.

Given that I didn’t study electronic music production in college there were many ways in which this was different than the music that I’d studied in depth. I’d listened to electronic music quite often, but I’d never listened with an analytic ear or with the intent of creating it myself.

So hearing the different sounds and how producers modulated and changed those sounds to create the effects that they wanted was useful. It was also useful to hear that certain sounds were commonly used by many different producers. Sounds like sawtooth waves and square waves were things that I heard many producers using. The same thing with certain percussion sounds. Many of those sounds were somewhat common between producers. They also often used one sound to play chords, creating like a piano type of sound.

It’s such a useful thing to do that sounds incredibly simple, but can help a whole lot. So I highly recommend you try it out.