Chapter 11
Composing from the Void
IN THIS CHAPTER
Making music out of everyday movement around you
Understanding gestural space in music
Checking out the eight different effort shapes
Using effort shapes to compose music
Exercising your effort shape knowledge
There’s going to be a time in your life when you want desperately to sit down and write a song or a piece of instrumental music, but you find you just can’t come up with anything. Nada. Zip. A complete and seemingly insurmountable case of composer’s block. So, does that mean you should admit you’ve got nothing left and quit? No way!
Never, ever give up.
One of the keys to being a successful and prolific musician is getting through these creative dry spells and coming out the other end with either a piece of finished music, some song lyrics and a melody, or even just a solid beginning, middle, or ending you can work on in the future. There are many ways to coax your creative juices out from hiding, including beating your head against the piano over and over again, a la Guy Smiley from Sesame Street.
In this chapter, we discuss two ways of squeezing blood from a turnip: using the environment around you and using a strange science called effort shapes.
Composing Using the Movement Around You
Many musicians, especially pianists, have a secret weapon in their composition arsenal that they almost never discuss with non-musicians because it seems either too matter-of-fact or just silly. When they’re having “dead” periods of no inspiration, they work on writing mini-soundtracks for the activities going on around them. For example, a cat walks into the room. What sound would the cat’s footsteps make if you were trying to capture the image in music? How about the cat’s voice? Let’s call the cat’s soundtrack Part A.
Now, what if the cat continued on into the kitchen, where your mother, or brother, or a 1950s housewife was cheerfully washing dishes? What would that soundtrack be? What if the dishwasher was actually your tired, stubble-faced roommate, who was rather unhappy about washing the dishes? What would his music sound like? How would both or either of those people react to the cat? There are your Parts B (the dishwasher) and C (the dishwasher and the cat) — practically a whole composition waiting for you in this scenario.
Look and listen around you. What did you do last night, this morning, whom did you see, what stories were told? What happened in your dream? Almost anything can serve as a starting point for some kind of soundtrack. Make a movie in your head out of the action in your life and then score that movie.
Your soundtrack can be a simple melody line that deftly “haikus” and condenses each character — or it may be a full melody with accompaniment. Capturing the essence of the activities around you in music can actually result in full-fledged compositions. On the other hand, they can end up as pieces of music you’ll never use in the real world. The purpose of this idea, however, is to get you to start playing and writing music again, to work past your composer’s block. Plus, it’s fun, too, and playing music for the fun of it is a great way to get your mind to relax and open itself up to new musical possibilities.
If you think this all sounds too silly to try yourself, try to wrap your head around this one: Much of Pyotr (Peter) Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s famous score for the The Nutcracker Suite was composed after the ballet had already been choreographed. He came in after all the “footwork” was done and wrote music to accompany the physical movements of the dancers. The dancers were his “movie,” and he wrote their soundtrack.
Composing Using Musical Gestures: “Gestural Space”
We touched briefly on musical gestures in Chapter 6, but because it connects to the ideas presented in this chapter, we’re bringing it up again. Musical gestures as compositional tools not only can be attached to the sounds one sees when someone is dancing or moving, but also when you yourself are moving. What sort of sound would you imagine a shrug making in a piece of music? Probably something short and quirky, right? What about the sound of your footsteps as you walk down the street, or the differences in this sound if you start running, or if you stop, or if you turn a corner? You yourself can be a tool for inspiring a composition — you just have to tap into the music in your head.
Whether we are aware of it or not, we express our moods, thoughts, and emotions with body language, which is just gestures made by our bodies. Let’s take a few common gestures that we as humans use every day across many cultures. Then, let’s imagine what they might suggest musically. Ask yourself if you can imagine a melody that moves like the following gestures:
- Shrug: This gesture is usually brief. It can start with an upward motion, but mostly the body drops down during a shrug.
- Walk: This could be fast or slow, light or heavy, pushing onward with directed determination, or flowing freely about with no particular destination. It could speed up or slow down. It could be an ascending walk, or a descending one.
- Deep breath: Always a deep breath rises first when we inhale. The speed and weight of the exhalation can express many variations of emotion. The rhythm of a series of breaths also can express much emotionally. A deep breath may be one of relief or it could be one of total frustration.
You can find many of these for yourself.
Now, if you think about an emotion, like surprise or tenderness or anger, the expression of these emotions through body language is simply a matter of combining physical gestures that we all know are indicative of those emotions. We don’t think about it or plan it much, but we all learn to provide body language (gestural) indicators of our emotions, and they all can be metaphorically suggested by music using tempo, melodic direction of movement, intensity, and so on. So you can think of music composition as the construction of a “gestural space,” where the listener is relating and responding to emotional triggers that you have exemplified with your melodic and rhythmic choices. This is why we can agree on a song being happy or sad or lonely or gregarious, even when there are no lyrics. Many composers do this without even realizing it, but how much more powerful is it if you are consciously manifesting your emotional intentions by drawing from the metaphorical language of music to paint your pictures?
As helpful as these everyday soundtrack ideas can be, there is a more systematic approach available to you: effort shapes. Here is a handy codification of styles of movement. In other words: there’s more than one way to say, “I love you.”
Introducing Effort Shapes
A more precise and useful way to describe movement than just walking and washing dishes is through the language of effort shapes (also called Laban Movement Analysis or Eukinetics). An effort shape is a style of movement that incorporates particular uses of weight, time, control, and space. When we use effort shapes to compose music, we’re trying to capture the emotion and feel of those movements in the music itself.
Effort shapes have been used by choreographers since the 1930s, after choreographer Rudolf von Laban published his treatise Kinetographie Laban in 1928, which detailed a system of dance notation that came to be called Labanotation. Labanotation is still used as one of the primary movement notation systems in dance.
During World War II, Laban fled from Germany to England. The British government hired him to observe factory and farm workers, analyze their movements, and devise more efficient procedures for them to follow to improve productivity. Laban broke down human movements into eight effort shapes. Used as a tool by dancers, athletes, and physical and occupational therapists, it is one of the most widely used systems of human movement analysis. His eight effort shapes are also used by acting teachers to help actors define the behaviors of characterizations they wish to portray, and in the area of behavioral analysis.
Effort, or what Laban sometimes described as dynamics, is a system for understanding the more subtle characteristics about the way a movement is done with respect to inner intention. The difference between punching someone in anger and reaching for a glass is slight in terms of body organization — both rely on extension of the arm. However, the attention to the strength of the movement, the control of the movement, and the timing of the movement are very different.
Effort has four subcategories, each of which has two opposite polarities:
- Weight: Heavy and light
- Time: Sustained and staccato
- Flow: Bound and free-flowing
- Space: Direct and indirect
Laban named the combination of the first three categories (space, weight, and time) the effort actions, or action drive. Flow, on the other hand, is responsible for the continuousness or ongoingness of motions. Without any flow effort, movement must be contained in a single initiation and action, which is why there are specific names for the flowless action configurations of effort. In general, it is very difficult to remove Flow from much movement, and so a full analysis of effort typically needs to go beyond the effort actions.
So, how does this all relate to composing music? Read on.
Weight: heavy versus light
The ideas of heaviness and lightness are easy enough to translate into musical terms. Something light is usually played softly or gently. Often light, melodic phrases are played by instruments with higher pitch ranges, but not always. A French horn can be played lightly or heavily in the low register, for example.
Light and heavy are also related to loud and soft. You might feel like a minor melody at a slow tempo is heavy by nature, but slow pieces in minor keys can have either light or heavy qualities. We are talking about light or heavy — not light or dark. With strings, light and heavy can be communicated through bowing. The specific articulations of other instruments also convey light and heavy.
Light and heavy can be expressed through choices of instrumentation as well. A violin or flute is inherently lighter than a saxophone or a trumpet. A string quartet may be lighter than a brass ensemble. Of course, the composer can control a wide range of weights within any of these instruments or instrument groupings.
Time: Sustained and staccato
Laban’s terms sustained and staccato mean almost the same things as the musical terms legato and staccato, but the musical terms refer more exactly to the general perceived flow of a melody. The notes may not be written exactly with legato or staccato indications in the sheet music. They may just come across as more or less smooth and connected or separated and quick. Writing indications in the actual sheet music works, too, but you don’t always have to go to this extreme to get the feeling across.
When staccato is light and direct, it can result in Dab, and when it gets heavy and bound, it might become Punch. Or if the energy is indirect, the light staccato becomes Flick and the heavy becomes Slash. (More on these terms later in this chapter.)
Flow: Bound and free-flowing
Bound and free-flowing are a little harder to grasp. A melody that is bound might be one that has very few trills or other ornaments. It would be fairly controlled and might be played by more than one instrument in unison or harmony, one instrument “binding” the other to the task of melody making.
A free-flowing melody is a little looser in construction. This is not to say that it jumps all over the place (that would make it free-flowing and indirect), but it might make more use of a single instrument’s virtuoso capabilities and not be so apt to stay a straight and narrow course. A bound melody might seem ponderous and deliberate, whereas a free-flowing melody rises and falls with ease and abandonment. In a sense, bound energy doesn’t communicate happiness as well as free-flowing energy does. Bound energy often conveys sorrow, pride, and determination. Some instruments are more bound or more free-flowing in general: The clarinet and piano are capable of free-flowing passages, but the baritone saxophone and bass viol are a bit more bound by nature.
Space: Direct and indirect
A direct melody doesn’t get diverted or sidetracked on its way to conclusion. It might be peppered with trills (playing two adjacent notes of a scale quickly), mordents (playing three adjacent notes of a scale quickly), and all manner of nuance, or it might move straight and simply, but it is headed from the beginning to the end without changing course or getting confused. It doesn’t beat around the bush. If I want you to give me a ride home, I can say, “Do you think you could give me a ride home?” Or I could say, “I wonder how I am going to get home later. I suppose I could walk or take a cab. Is there a bus that runs later?” That’s the difference between direct and indirect. Eventually I get home, but the indirect example is a roundabout journey just to get the ride.
Many composers make efforts to ensure that their melodies are always a little indirect. Bela Bartok was a great example of this. Mozart was very direct, on the other hand. At a time when listeners demanded that their expectations be fulfilled musically, it was difficult for composers to write much in the way of indirect melodies. Direct melodic choices are always the ones that get stuck in your head. Indirect melodic choices demand your attention and are interesting, but often are soon gone from memory — or rather, they are remembered indirectly. You remember the sense of them without remembering the exact notes.
Now that you have some sense of what the effort shapes mean, let’s connect them more directly to composing music.
Composing Using Effort Shapes
Basically, as we have tried to establish, effort shapes are natural human styles of movement, and they convey moods and emotions. They are body language. They are gestural. Any musical phrase or passage can also be broken down into Laban’s four components and resolved into his eight effort shapes.
The eight effort shapes have been given names, and here we attempt to describe each shape musically. For the most part, the names of the effort shapes speak for themselves. It is also easy to see how you can use these names as a guide for composing music that conveys certain moods.
Dab
Dab is light, direct, staccato, and free-flowing.
Imagine you’re dabbing something with a paintbrush, or the tip of a washcloth. When you dab, you’re not striking it hard, and you’re not squishing it flat. You’re gently and quickly poking it.
When you want to capture the feeling of dabbing in your music, you’re going to play it lightly and quickly — like you’re softly and quickly poking the exact center of a piano key. You have a musical idea you want to quickly get across to your listeners, and you’re not going to dance around things to get it across. But you’re not trying to hit your listeners over the head with it, either.
Mozart wrote a lot of dab music, as do contemporary composers like Pharrell Williams, Momus, Bob Marley, and Bruno Mars.
Flick
Flick is light, indirect, staccato, and free-flowing.
Imagine you’re flicking an eyelash off of someone’s cheek with your finger. You’re not pouncing on that little stray hair to remove it — instead, you’re aiming at the general direction of the hair, just brushing against the cheek of the person and the area around the eyelash as well. When you’re trying to capture the feeling of flicking in your music, you’re quickly and gently hitting the notes you want to hit, but you’re also playing with the notes around your core musical idea as well.
Serialism and fugue counterpoint use the concept of flick in their construction, as do artists such as J. S. Bach, Philip Glass, and Can.
Glide
Glide is light, direct, sustained, and bound.
Imagine a bird gliding, and make your music take on that sound. When you’re writing music that glides, keep in mind that you’re trying to make music that soars, just like that bird.
Waltz of the Flowers, from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, Brian Eno’s atmospherics, and Arvo Pärt all manage to convey glide.
Press
Press is heavy, direct, sustained, and bound.
Press music does just that — it presses down hard on the listener. This is you, the composer, pressing down hard on the fly that landed on your keyboard, slowly and with great intent. There’s no misconstruing your musical concept when you compose in press, which is why almost all heavy goth music and slowcore fit under this heading.
Wagner, Low, Nick Cave, Sonic Youth, Billie Eilish, Mogwai, Popol Vuh, and Joy Division all are into press.
Float
Float is light, indirect, sustained, and free-flowing.
Float is a lot like glide, except that it is less direct.
Think Claude Debussy, Dave Brubeck, and Stereolab.
Punch
Punch is heavy, direct, staccato, and bound.
This is the most direct and aggressive-sounding music of the bunch. When you write music with punch, you’re telling your audience that you have a message and you want them to hear it right now. You’re punching out the notes on your instrument — if you’re playing the piano, you’re hitting the keys directly and with force.
Music with punch includes Stravinsky, The Ramones, P. J. Harvey, Nina Simone, Herb Alpert — and basically, for that matter, most rock and rap music.
Slash
Slash is heavy, indirect, staccato, and free-flowing.
Slash is a lot like punch, except that the message and the sound aren’t hammered so much into the audience. You’re toying with the audience a bit, putting them just a bit on edge and catching them by surprise with your musical and rhythmic choices.
Think Stravinsky, Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie, Jarboe, and Akron/Family.
Wring
Wring is heavy, indirect, sustained, and bound.
Think of wringing out a washcloth, and you’ve got the basic idea behind what you’re trying to do to your audience when you use this effort shape. You’re slowly wringing them out emotionally while moving to your musical climax, potentially exhausting them with the sheer effort of moving to the end of the song or the section of music.
Think Holst, Bartok, Ennio Morricone, Throbbing Gristle, and Popol Vuh.
Shaping story and mood by combining effort shapes
Your composition tells a story. Using effort shapes, you can decide on the moods of your story and the order in which you want to present them, and then you can write heavy, light, direct, indirect, and so on to get the moods across to the listener. You can use a change of effort shape to develop or restate a motif or melodic phrase.
Just as there are a lot of ways to say, “I love you,” there are also many ways to present any melodic idea. A single phrase can be arranged to sound sustained or staccato. You can take any musical idea and frame it into an effort shape with surprisingly little difficulty using choices of orchestration, tempo, the octave in which the melody is played, or almost anything else you like. The effort shapes just give you handy, pre-packaged combinations of ingredients to get your message across.
A good way to get a grasp on composition is to listen for these effort shapes in the music of others. They are everywhere. Although composers don’t often use them consciously, it is difficult to find a single moment in music that can’t be assigned one or more effort shapes. Most musical compositions move back and forth between a couple different effort shapes. Some music stays pretty much on a single one. And some compositions run almost the entire gamut of them. This is true for tonal music, atonal music, popular, hip-hop, jazz, metal, classical, and so on. Some genres of music are almost entirely characterized by single effort shapes. There is a good deal of Punch and Dab in hip-hop, a lot of Slash in metal, and Press in rock and roll. Jazz uses a lot of Glide, Float, and Flick energy.
Consider Jupiter from Gustav Holst’s The Planets (op. 32). To follow along, you may have to go out and get a recording of this orchestral suite. But if you don’t have it already, you should anyway. Elsewhere is this book we have mentioned that many modern film composers seem to have been influenced by this composition. Maybe a reason for its influence is that Holst moves us through so many different moods — or effort shapes.
The string entrance is flick with a little suggestion of slash. The brass enters with a heavy dab leading to punch. A few punches, then some more dab, a little slash and wring leading to another punch, and we’re back to dab and punch. More dabs leading to punch followed by press when the melody smooths out. Then it speeds up into slash and punch and holds as a little bit of a lighter wring. The main melody that comes in later in the low strings is press. This melody is (all together now!) heavy, direct, sustained, and bound. After this, we go back to dab and flick till we hit punch again. You can take it from there.
Notice that more than one effort-shape can be happening at the same time. The strings can play flick and slash or wring while the brass plays a press/dab melody.
Make sure you listen to “Neptune” to hear the contrast to what you heard in “Jupiter.” “Neptune” has a lot of float and some glide energy mixed with a little wring here and there.
If you want to hear a composition with some obvious slash and punch energy, listen to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.
Human moods are expressed through body language, and styles of movement are defined by effort shapes. Music is expressive of moods through its movements through time and space by way of its rhythms and melodies. The effort shapes codify movements and give us the tools to translate physical, human movement and body language into music.
When we began this chapter, we suggested that you look at your daily life as a movie. And when composing for film or dance, it is important to observe the relationships between movement styles, cultural and socioeconomic frameworks, and the music you compose. It can be a dangerous stretch to use contemporary sounds and styles to score a film about, say, Elizabethan England.
Remember that you yourself move with a certain combination of weight, speed, directness, and so on. This combination might influence your likes and dislikes and even the style of your compositions. That’s fine, but you shouldn’t be limited by your own natural combination. If you want to enjoy continued success as a music composer, you will need to learn to embrace a broader variety of movement styles (see Holst’s The Planets). If you are lucky, you could become successful by virtue of your stylistic limitations — just realize that if so, it might limit how much variety you can get away with later on.
Exercises
The following exercises ask you to apply what you now know about effort shapes and musical ideas.
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Pick out five of your favorite pieces of music and determine their effort shapes.
Which effort shapes from Exercise 1 show up the most within your five musical selections?
- Search your music collection for effort shapes that are missing from your list from Exercise 1.
- Compose an eight- to sixteen-measure melody using each of the missing effort shapes from Exercise 2.
- If you have composed any music, determine the effort shapes you used.
- Pick any two effort shapes and try to write a 16-measure transition from one to the other.
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Take shrugging, walking, or deep breathing and write a musical phrase for it interpreted from the perspective of each effort shape.
For example: What musical idea would express a “Press” shrug? How about a “Flick” shrug? And so on.
- Write a four-measure to eight-measure musical introduction that expresses each of the above effort shapes musically.