Tobias Reber – Page 13 – a hundred quirky legs

Composition Exercise #442

Create a sine wave about that time you got beat up in the schoolyard.

Refactor your composition.

Write a piece for choir in which all singers wear face masks and are free to walk around the room).

Each mask has a pitch or phrase written on it that others can read and sing, using a tuning fork to find the correct pitch.

Other instructions such as groups of notes to choose from, onomatopoetic words or text scores are also possible.

Expression through abstraction.

Change the way you compose.
Compose the way you change.

Use the intervals from one melody as a transposition row for another melody.

If they don’t have the same amount of intervals, permutate them until they meet again at their respective beginnings.

Listen to a piece of music

as if it were composed by a good friend

who just told you they think it’s the beginning

of a new phase in their work.

Visit one of your childhood homes.

Ask the current inhabitants if they’d let you record sounds in the room where you made your first sound recordings.

If they let you in, thank them by also playing them the recordings you made as a child.

Compose a series of interlinked pieces in which there are flashbacks, flash forwards and flash sideways.

Talk about silence.
Be quiet about silence.
Talk about sound.
Be quiet about sound.