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Is there a standard or established Syllabus or Curriculum for Composition?

JimDiGritz

JimDiGritz

Senior Member
I'm on a journey to develop my compositional skills, and am keen to focus on classic composition (especially 20th century late romantic)

I've started a few courses and they all approach the subject from different starting points and cover areas in different order. I've also got some specific courses like "Composing in Sonata form". Plus, obviously I have 100's of YouTube videos covering almost every possible subject.

Option 1 is to complete each book and course in their order and then move on to the next, this is the simplest but feels a little disjointed.

Option 2 is to follow a simple curriculum and visit each relevant course/book section until I feel comfortable with it. For example Alan Belkin spends a lot of time on his YT channel discussing Functional Harmony. There are many detailed resources specifically covering Counterpoint etc.

I would also want to include orchestration in this list.

Is there a standard or established Syllabus or Curriculum for Composition? I've looked on the traditional music schools website like Berklee but they don't seem to publish a detailed course structure. I'm thinking of creating a Google Sheet with links to free and paid content.

Finally, of course a big percentage of my time is also being spent actively listening to and reading scores that I love - but I'd really like to progress in a more structured manner.

Thanks

**EDIT

For what it's worth here is my first attempt at a simple structure:

Melody
Rhythmic
Tonal
Non-Chord Tones (Passing, Neighbour, Appoggiatura, Escape etc)
Melodic Forms
Period, Sentence & Ternery

Harmony
Functions
Cadences
Implied Harmony
Voicing & Inversions

Counterpoint
Species

Structure & Form
Sonata
Rondo
Minuet

Orchestration
Click to read more...
 
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I‘ve been wondering much the same thing. I did think of asking Gareth Green at mmcourses.co.uk if he would recommend taking his courses in any particular order. But I didn’t get round to it, because taking several of his courses would work out quite expensive.
 
In lieu of any smart ideas I've started down the rabbit hole of finding and tagging music resources in a free tool I found called Zotero.

I decided to use a semi-structured Tagging system/taxonomy only because I felt that so many topics could be covered from multiple angles... And a rigid hierarchical structure would get very complex very quickly. You can see some of the Tags on the bottom left.

The tool is actually very impressive - there's even a Chrome extension which allows me to instantly add a page (ie a YouTube video) to the Collection and start adding tags. It does quite a lot automatically which is impressive - eg feed it a YouTube link from the Chrome extension and it auto-populates the Title and Creator!

I've even started to add tagged links to my paid/enrolled course content (so when looking for resources covering say Period form, I not only get YT content eg some of Ryan Leach's excellent free videos, but also a link to the section in his Pillars of Composition which covers Period form... etc)

Zotero seems to be actually designed for academic research so it has some cite/reference/index features I'm not using yet which might be really powerful when adding local documents (eg pdfs) or articles online.

I'm hoping to build a long term learning framework and reference guide. Clearly the online content could be removed at any time, but I think that this is the best way forward.


1670524772105.png

You can see here that I've also added links to local documents on my PC (like the Spectratone Reference Chart I bought) - you just drag 'n tag!
1670525618134.png
 
DavidRubenstein said:
The most comprehensive online course that I have found is scoreclub.net
It is a subscription service. The courses that I have taken there are all excellent.
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Thanks, I did start SC previously but at the time I wasn't confident enough in my basic theory or sightreading to make use of the subscription.

That wasn't really the question though, I was actually looking for a detailed music education curriculum that I could use as a basis to structure all of the content and resources that I already have access to...
 
Aldwell and Schachter's Harmony and Voice Leading, as you would expect, deals with melody and counterpoint as well as harmony; so that offers one approach (certainly not the only one) to the question of how to interweave one's study of those topics. Perhaps you could find a book on Amazon that covers all the topics you list, and has the Look Inside feature, so you can see how the various topics are ordered?
 
The problem with composition as a curriculum is that it requires music theory as a prerequisite. Everyone wants to fly before they crawl. Freshman theory should be a yearlong course with rigorous training in partwriting and harmonic analysis. The second year should advance to counterpoint and extended tertian harmony. In the third year, form and analysis, jazz harmony (in other words, more extended tertian harmony), and basic orchestration.

This is the way I both learned and taught it at university. These things need not necessarily take a year to complete, but I can’t begin to convey to you the importance of harmonic analysis and partwriting. You should get yourself a copy of the Bach Riemenschneider 371 chorales and analyze every one of them thoroughly. You should then do partwriting exercises until you are completely fluid with Bach’s four part style. This is the foundation of all tertian harmony in the western world.

Most won’t heed this advice because they think they can take a shortcut, but I assure you, this is the road to Rome.
 
Jett Hitt said:
The problem with composition as a curriculum is that it requires music theory as a prerequisite. Everyone wants to fly before they crawl. Freshman theory should be a yearlong course with rigorous training in partwriting and harmonic analysis. The second year should advance to counterpoint and extended tertian harmony. In the third year, form and analysis, jazz harmony (in other words, more extended tertian harmony), and basic orchestration.

This is the way I both learned and taught it at university. These thing need not necessarily take a year to complete, but I can’t begin to convey to you the importance of harmonic analysis and partwriting. You should get yourself a copy of the Bach Riemenschneider 371 chorales and analyze every one of them thoroughly. You should then do partwriting exercises until you are completely fluid with Bach’s four part style. This is the foundation of all tertian harmony in the western world.

Most won’t heed this advice because they think they can take a shortcut, but I assure you, this is the road to Rome.
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I fully appreciate this approach. Not sure if this was a barb aimed at me. I'm not looking for a 'shortcut', merely trying to organise around 23,000 hours of learning material into a meaningful structure.

Perhaps you could share your freshman curriculum?

My approach has been to look at a concept from multiple angles and multiple teachers. There's been several instances where a lecture lost me, but a 5 min video brought the concept to life.. and of course there are the summary videos that need a 3 hour lecture to properly understand.

In fact I've spent the last 6 hours purely getting to know the Period Form and am spending the next few days simply looking through scores and identifying phrases, cadences and periods. To get me started I've got around 20 scores from Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Bach to analyse.

I'm also simultaneously writing some Period form to try to solidify the concept. Does that mean I'm prematurely playing at being a composer??:)

Jett Hitt said:
The problem with composition as a curriculum is that it requires music theory as a prerequisite. Everyone wants to fly before they crawl. [...]
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BTW I'm 46 now, so perhaps I'll be able to fly before I die!
 
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JimDiGritz said:
I fully appreciate this approach. Not sure if this was a barb aimed at me. I'm not looking for a 'shortcut', merely trying to organise around 23,000 hours of learning material into a meaningful structure.

Perhaps you could share your freshman curriculum?
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This was not intended as a barb toward you at all. This forum frequently entertains questions of this nature, which are often fraught with "I can't learn theory" or "I don't read music, but I wanna write like JW." Your attitude seems much hungrier, otherwise I wouldn't have even posted.

46 is extremely late to start on this journey. Note that I did not say that it was impossible, though I assure you that you will never write like JW. Before I direct you to a path, however, let me begin with this quote from my first counterpoint book, a quote taken from a 16th-century counterpoint treatise:

"Drops wear away the stone not by strength, but by constant falling."

My curriculum for a freshman student would have simply been to work through the Bruce Benward theory text with the workbook. That was 20 years ago, so I am going to let @jbuhler give you his current recommendation. (As I recall, my undergraduate text was the Benjamin/Horvit/Nelson.)

What you would have gotten from my class that you can never get from a video is feedback. You need a tutor to proof your work and point out when you've gone astray--someone to keep you on the straight and narrow. I would recommend reaching out to someone like @A.Heppelmann for private lessons.

Music theory is really nothing more than 6th grade math. It is not that complicated, but you need the foundation I talked about above to advance.
 
Jett Hitt said:
As I recall, my undergraduate text was the Benjamin/Horvit/Nelson.
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This is what I learned on as well. I think it is considered too schematic today, though I prefer it because it was easy to consult in the days I needed that. We used Kostka Paine for most of my time at UT but changed to Laitz several years ago. They are both solid, with advantages and disadvantages like all textbooks. They are all designed for instructional use so are not the best for self study. In fact I’m not sure what I’d recommend for self study. I used a Piston third edition to teach myself harmony when I was in high school. It wasn’t a bad framework for later, course based harmony.

I think harmony, form, and orchestration are easier to teach to oneself than counterpoint and basics of composition. There is so much implicit knowledge that is conveyed in the feedback, pointing out where you are boxing yourself in, the difference between a correct solution and a good one, etc.
 
As @jbuhler points out, these texts aren't great for self study. That's why I recommended a tutor. In fact, I didn't even require my students to buy the Benward textbook but rather just the workbook. (I had one on reserve in the library.) My theory classes were mostly just a lab where everyone put their partwriting examples on the board, and then the entire class tore them apart. This provided some serious incentive to come to class and do the homework. It was very effective, though the students did call me "Dr. Evil."
 
@Jett Hitt - I appreciate that you're not here to offer free music lessons, however as a newcomer to the Bach Chorales (which I've moved up to the top of my list!) I'm encountering some unusual chord functions and after a bit of research I read that this is in part due to these Chorales being Baroque period interpretations of earlier religious pieces and essentially represent a transition between the Renaissance and Classical periods. My limited understanding of Harmonic functions is probably from the Classical era onwards.

So may I ask why are the Bach Chorales considered to be a good starting point if they eschew many of the more established Harmonic functions? This is a genuine question, I'm sure there's a good answer!
 
The scholar Derek Remeš, if I‘ve understood him correctly, argues that Bach himself would not expect his students to attempt the style of his well-known chorales until they had progressed through figured bass and relatively simple, homophonic four-part writing; and that this is a good path for modern students too. I’m not qualified to express an opinion. But, despite having studied harmony at university level and learned to do passable four-part writing, I would still have difficulty analysing the 371. Many (most?) of them are too harmonically advanced for me. So I find Remeš’s approach quite appealing.

I’m not sure how to adapt this approach for self-study, though. I’m currently working through Clough and Conley’s programmed text Basic Harmonic Progressions, which obviously is no substitute for a teacher but proceeds in a step-by-step fashion which I find less daunting than the standard textbooks. Maybe that just proves that I’m not hungry enough. But I can barely remember being 46, so there’s clearly no hope for me anyway. ;)
 
Wensleydale said:
The scholar Derek Remeš, if I‘ve understood him correctly, argues that Bach himself would not expect his students to attempt the style of his well-known chorales until they had progressed through figured bass and relatively simple, homophonic four-part writing; and that this is a good path for modern students too. I’m not qualified to express an opinion. But, despite having studied harmony at university level and learned to do passable four-part writing, I would still have difficulty analysing the 371. Many (most?) of them are too harmonically advanced for me. So I find Remeš’s approach quite appealing.

I’m not sure how to adapt this approach for self-study, though. I’m currently working through Clough and Conley’s programmed text Basic Harmonic Progressions, which obviously is no substitute for a teacher but proceeds in a step-by-step fashion which I find less daunting than the standard textbooks. Maybe that just proves that I’m not hungry enough. But I can barely remember being 46, so there’s clearly no hope for me anyway. ;)
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Thanks, this makes sense.

I was personally looking into https://amzn.eu/d/6GWHIlg (Tonal Harmony by Kostka), but I'll need to find a second hand copy since £140 is a bit rich...
 
in light of @Jett Hitt 's remarks above, William Lovelock wrote a 3 year structured classic text that did me the world of good...

Amazon product ASIN 1846093201
There's also second and third year books. All come with exercises to do. He also wrote books on free counterpoint and the examination fugue. I went through the lot in my formative years and came out the other end with much technical know-how and as a result, much in the way of creative options when composing.
 
mikeh-375 said:
William Lovelock wrote a 3 year structured classic text that did me the world of good...There's also second and third year books. All come with exercises to do.
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Would you recommend these for someone who knows (or thinks he knows) the basics of music theory? Sure, I can write a piece using my ears and the little knowledge I have, but I'd like to have a more solid bank of knowledge at my disposal when writing. A study book with exercises seems right up my alley...
 
J-M said:
Would you recommend these for someone who knows (or thinks he knows) the basics of music theory? Sure, I can write a piece using my ears and the little knowledge I have, but I'd like to have a more solid bank of knowledge at my disposal when writing. A study book with exercises seems right up my alley...
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I haven't read it yet but apparently Tonal Harmony by Kostka uses some real examples to illustrate the theory.
 
Some textbooks (including Kostka & Payne) have accompanying workbooks. But they are mostly not intended for self-study.
 
All great advice. I too have been teaching lower division theory for decades - still do. I know the Benward book is a bit dated, but it's still very accessible. You can find the instructor's manual with answers for the first volume online as a PDF. It's for and older version, but the book hasn't changed all that much. I haven't seen the second volume instructor's manual.

Here is a book that is self-paced - "Harmonic Materials In Tonal Music" by Greg Steinke. There are two volumes and all the answer are given. It's actually not half bad and it's very concise.

Another option is to check out WW Norton's theory books. "Musicians's Guide To Theory" is decent and with the eBook option you get their online resources which include tutorials and quizzes. It's actually not bad.

ThinkSpace also has a couple of music theory courses for fairly cheap.
 
I am sorry if I made this sound like the Riemenschneider was the starting point. Analyzing the 371 and writing fluidly in Bach's four-part style is the goal for the completion of this level. This is why you need a tutor. I can't imagine tackling this on my own. A tutor will be able to hand you a piece of music and say, "Analyze this and skip the chords on beats x,y, and z because we'll cover those after you have learned them."

There used to be anthologies compiled by theorists that slowly introduced harmonies with real-life examples. I can't remember who compiled any of these, however. (Norton probably offers a lot.) I seem to recall that the Benward contained such examples in the text. Most theory books do. There is absolutely no reason to go buy a new college textbook. I didn't even require my students to buy these years ago. Here, for example, is the old counterpoint book that I used both as a student and a professor.


The textbook industry is one of the great scams ever. That's why the Piston books are still around because they can be a cheap alternative, though the language is a bit dense. (Used bookstores are your friend.) Look for old editions. The information has not changed.
 
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