Music and Worship: Composers and Composing: Part 2

There are several ways of composing. One is by improvisation – making up music by playing or singing it, before (perhaps) remembering it and then (perhaps) writing it down. This is how most composers of jazz and popular music work, but some ‘classical’ composers, including Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, were fine improvisers too. On a much less ambitious level, many organists improvise, particularly to provide short ‘filling in’ passages in a service, for example as the choir enters.

Some people can hear musical ideas in their heads and then memorise them or capture them in writing. Mozart is said to have been able to conceive complete works in this way. Paul McCartney apparently woke one morning to hear the music and words of ‘Yesterday’ in his head. Are such things the fruits of divine inspiration? God has certainly given prodigious musical gifts to some, but it’s principally the diligent cultivation of these gifts that leads to successful composing. Do you recall Thomas Edison’s remark that genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration (i.e. hard work!)?

Much composition is done on paper, using various rules and shortcuts to make extended pieces out of ideas conceived in the head or through improvisation. Because it’s the sound not the look of the music that really matters, people who compose on paper have to hear what they write – but of course memory gradually helps you associate the symbols on the page with the sounds they represent. Nevertheless composers usually try out what they’ve written on the piano or some other instrument and then make changes and improvements, having heard the ‘real’ sound of what they’ve written.

Finally, a short case-study. The opening of an Agnus Dei (‘Lamb of God’) often sung at St Boniface in Ordinary Time came to me straight off when I decided to set these words.

[Original article had Sibelius graphic at this point. The book ‘Music and Worship’ printed the whole piece.]

It wasn’t inspiration – more a kind of subconscious mixing up in my head of lots of similar simple melodies heard before. I wanted a kind of gentle flow (almost like plainsong), so all notes were of equal length. How should I follow this? ‘Have mercy on us’ suggests humility, lowliness. So I used melody notes low in the range, all at the same pitch – with little energy or vigour.

The words of the Agnus Dei are in three sections, the second exactly the same as the first. To reuse the music of the first section in the second is labour-saving and easier for singers, but perhaps a little unenterprising. Why not, then, go up slightly higher on the second ‘Have mercy on us’, as if there were now greater hope that mercy might be granted? The third section begins with the same words as the first and second. By now the opening melody needs change; I gave it a lift at the end to prepare us for the closing petition ‘Grant us peace’. How greatly we need peace – in the world, perhaps in our neighbourhood, at work, in our homes or inside us – so why not ask God for it more than once, insistently, each time to a similar but slightly different phrase?

[This ends the final article from 'Music and Worship' (2007).]