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I’m a budding composer/High School Student in Melbourne, Australia, and everytime I listen to the opening Spider-Man Theme I wonder: “How the hell would you write something this good!”
When I say good, I mean, to have the ability to make me feel how I do every time I hear it, like an emotional blast everytime a new set of instruments comes in with the theme, or the rhythm.
How does Danny write music so well? I’m stuck on writing dodgey little melodies in e Flat Major…how can I move on to this type of writing??
move away from key signatures man. especially major ones!! don’t get so restricted by staying in one key. write minor stuff. major to minor chord progression is nice. even on the one chord, play an fmajor triad follwed by an f minor triad. just movin the a to an a flat. somethin like that. listen to a dude called szymanowsky aswell. his stuff’s great.
developing your ideas is important too. if you have a melody say which was originally written with the key of e major in mind. y not try augmenting the note values, intervals or pitches and turn the melody backwards, split it in two and stuff like that. turn it into a chord. there’s X amount of things you can do. if you like danny’s stuff i think you should try imitating it for a little while. doing a pastiche of peoples work can really help you to understand its structure and harmonic movement. also listen very carefully to how danny splits his melodies and plays them in different situations. it’s possible to make a good entire piece of music based on one 8 note melody if you know what to do with it! and personally i find writing for a bigger ensemble kinda easier than writing for solo. i wrote for solo guitar there for the irish guitar festival and i found it more challenging than writing for a huge ensemble because you don’t have as many options for development in a way.
anyway,
goodluck!Experiment with chords, as mentioned above. Also, as mentioned, try simulating or even studying Elfman’s stuff. Play the Tales From the Crypt theme or the Edward Scissorhands theme on the piano. It will give you a good visual image of how he strings different notes, melodies and harmonies together. My education basically consisted of playing Elfman ditties and trying to emulate his sound. After that, though, you should start to develop your own sound, and experiment a little more. You don’t want to become a composer who can only simulate another composer’s style.
That’s just one way to go, though. The possibilities are endless. Just do what feels right for you. You need to have fun, too, though. Don’t be stressed out just because you can’t compose a “spiderman” overnight. That will get you no where fast. It can take years of practice.
I would have to personally disagree with elf… I think that limiting oneself to a solo instrument of ANY kind expands creativity in that it is much harder to make a piece interesting (barring piano, guitar). To write for solo flute, clarinet, even timpani, is a great challenge to put yourself through.
Also, when isolated, the Spiderman theme will look MUCH more simplistic than you are thinking it to be. What makes elfman’s music sound as rich and complex as it does is the orchestral accompaniment and augmentation of his themes, not the themes themselves, generally speaking.
I took a composition class in college and the prof. would bring in a Beethoven piece – pass out the sheet music and play it on cd with all of us reading the score. When the piece was done he would go measure by measure and break down the melody into chord structures and show the progressions he was using and it blew my mind because a lot of it was so simple in it’s core. You can do things with the orchestration that makes it become larger than life. I love the Spiderman theme because it is the same way, very simple but it is the sound to me that stirs my emotions and where I get my connection to that piece of music.
Like Elf said just experiment – can do all sorts of composition tricks to help evolve your theme – a trick I learned when I was forced to write for solo oboe and flute (REALLY difficult like the others have said to write with all of those limitations) was you can create a harmony by doing the opposite of the main melody line. If it goes up a minor third, have the harmony go down a minor third and so on. Retrograde (?) I think is when you play your theme backwards but been so long since school that I can’t honestly say!
I try to forget all of that nonsense and just look at it all as sound and colour when I write THEN go and make sure most of it is correct composition wise. I am a firm believer in if it sounds good and it seems to turn you on then go with it.
Trust you ear over anything else you do, you ear will catch things a lot faster than your brain will.Best of luck!
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