How do composers compose?

Question

I am (mostly) a programmer, so I usually understand complex things.

What I find difficult is to understand the work of a (music) composer. He needs to write the exact "songs" of each instrument in the orchestra, the "songs" of each character (in case of an e.g. opera), for each "voice" in the choir...

How can / does the composer manage the complexity?

Sorry if I used the wrong words. If they do not make sense, please ask and I will clarify.

Answer 1

I take it that this is a general question about how composing music works. You are not asking for a ready to go method for you to practice it yourself.

I wanted to post this as a comment, but the story is too long.

The question inevitably leads to a discussion or at least a very long list of considerations. I feel that you are mostly interested in an explanation that you personally can imagine. But some composers do seem to work with a strike of genius, something you say you are not interested in. Composers do or did exist who can manage all information at once. But other great composers were probably always struggling, working very hard to get to a satisfying result. Compare it to a painter. One may have a complete picture in his mind and know exactly what materials and colors to use right away. Someone else might just start with an empty canvas and put paint on it and see how it works out. Yes, a symphony can start as a piano piece which is then branched into different instruments. But it could just as well start with the composer thinking about certain instruments and using the piano piece as intermediate.

Then you say you are not interested in technical stuff like notation. Reflect this on your programming experience and see how it sounds. Notation and the accompanying language represent possible building blocks and rules in the creation process. But ok, in art, as far is i know, it is fully legal to ignore them.

So there are many answers to your question, it is up to you which ones you like the most, but in general very different approaches of composing will turn out to be equally valid. Better still: all methods are allowed at the same time, that's the fun of it!

Answer 2

Your question is really too broad. But a few things that might help you understand how the complexity is "managed..."

• "Classical" style harmony is normally based on three tone triads or 4 tone seventh chords, these 3 or 4 tones may be duplicated at the unison or octaves but the harmony is "managed" abstractly as a reduction to the 3 or 4 unique tones to make a chord.
• Some music - contrapuntal music like the fugue - isn't strictly chord based, but the number of "voices" used in such music is typically 3 or 4.
• In chord based music (homophonic) the 3 to 4 tone chords are played from "parts", the parts are bass, melody, and inner voices (tenor/alto.) These parts have unique roles and there is only one bass part.
• based on the above a large ensemble like a symphonic orchestra can have dozen of players but on a abstract level all of that reduces to a small number of parts to manage.
• A similar abstract reduction can be done regarding melody. A passage of music many have many, many notes played with fast rhythms, but some of those notes can be regarded as decorative and subordinate to structural harmonic notes.

I have oversimplified a lot of things, but from those few points I think you can understand that music works with levels of abstraction. Composers manage the complexity of music - at least in part - by understanding those abstraction layers.

By analogy you might think about abstraction and software layers. You might have a private function like myGet(url) which uses a built-in like file_get_contents() which eventually uses a socket and at some point might handle ascii/hex/binary date, etc. You understand all that stuff, but you don't think about all of it all the time.

Answer 3

Music is art. An artist is supposed to create, not just copy, repeat, or imitate. There is no point in making anything that already exists. Please image-google "graphic score" and behold what can be done without any standard technical stuff whatsoever. I think it's pretty interesting.