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Composing classical music by analyzing classical form!

Posted

Hi!

I am looking for composing classical music for piano or orchestra using the approach described in this book 'Analyzing Classical Form'.

Analyzing Classical Form by William E. Caplin

Do you think Synfire can be used in this approach? I hope Synfire 2 have this feature. 

Many thanks

IS

 


Fri, 2021-09-17 - 09:55 Permalink

Synfire doesn't impose significant limits on the forms you could use to compose anything (with the exception of microtonal music). So yes, you can compose classical music by adhering to its known forms, but there's no specific feature that has "classical form" rules built in.

You would lookup these forms from the book and follow them when you pick chords from palettes (easy, since functional harmony is part of it) or generate and select lots of phrases with 2.0 Factories. 

Where you place these phrases and harmony however, is entirely your personal choice.

For example, there is no feature "Dramatic Build-Up and Collapse" that would do all this for you at the click of a button. Instead you figure out what forms make up this kind of listener experience (the book seems to be a good resource, although there are many others). Then you generate the figures you need and place them with drag & drop into a container.

You'd probably end up with two containers "Dramatic Build-Up" and "Collapse" with all that stuff in them. Then you can move them (or aliases of them) around to experiment how a build-up and/or collapse would sound at different places in the score.