What if you could meet with John Williams, play him a piece of music you're working on,
and have him show you exactly what he would do?
Or if you're developing a melody or musical idea,
sit down with Mozart and have him show you how he would handle the material?
Show me.
Well this is exactly what a 10 year old boy in late 19th century Vienna figured out how to do
and in this video I'll show you five steps for how you can do it too.
Hey guys, welcome back to my channel!
If you're new here my name is Ryan, I'm a composer for film,
TV, and video games and this is where I talk about the craft of writing music.
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film scoring, and all that good stuff please remember to subscribe.
So in the 1890s a young boy named Ernst Toch got
his hands on the sheet music for Mozart's string quartets.
He was so infatuated with the music that he wanted to get even more
immersed so he started copying it out by hand.
"Perhaps in order to prolong my exaltation I started to copy it, which gave me deeper insight."
But then he had an idea.
"I decided I would only continue with my copying up to the repeat sign and then try my hand at
making that part myself which leads back to the original key. Then I compared with the original."
It is miraculous.
This unusual method of learning to compose worked out extremely well for Toch.
He went on to win composition competitions, became a film composer in 1930s Hollywood,
was a lecturer at USC and Harvard, wrote a book and even went on to win a Pulitzer Prize.
So here's how you can use the same method in your own study.
Step one find your inspiration.
Choose a piece that resonates with you but that you don't already know how it goes.
If you're choosing a piece that you already know the ending to, you're kind of missing the point.
You're gonna end up just trying to copy that.
You need to do something where you don't actually know how the composer solved it.
The rest is just the same.
Step two choose a stopping point.
Toch was using pieces that were in the Sonata Allegro form,
so it was just natural to stop at the end of the exposition before the development.
If you're not using a piece in that form then probably
about a third of the way in is a good guideline.
If you were doing a song that might mean after the first verse and chorus.
You want to stop at a point where the main ideas have been introduced, you know all the
material you've got to work with, but you don't exactly know the journey that it's going to go on.
Step 3 is to copy your training material.
It was the late 1800s so Toch had no choice but to copy the Mozart by hand.
I know if I was doing this by hand I would just get bored and I would stop doing it.
If you want to do this in your DAW I think that's perfectly fine, what matters is that
you get down the essentials: the melodies, the harmonies, the rough idea of the orchestration.
Don't worry so much about getting a sonic sound alike where you're
copying every drum beat and EQing woodwind runs.
The point is to just get familiar with the actual composition material itself,
the motives and ideas and chords and things that are the essence of the piece.
Just listening to it is really not going to be good enough.
You need to be inputting the notes so you're really observing and appreciating
and understanding what the notes are and what's happening.
Not too fast. Do you have it?
You go too fast. Do you have it?
First bassoon to the trombone what?
With the tenors.
Identical?
Step four is to write what comes next.
Now this is obviously the hardest part of the whole thing.
This is where you actually have to put in your creative sweat,
use your skills and techniques and actually come up with something new.
That doesn't really work, does it?
If you're really struggling and you just cannot get started, a good way is to go back,
copy bar one from the beginning of the composition and then in bar two go the opposite direction.
So if they went up you go down or vice versa.
Then let the melody naturally take you on this new trajectory that you've set up.
You can always go back and change these first few bars if they sound stupid but at least it
will get you rolling, it will get you out of any kind of writer's block to get your pen moving.
No no listen to me. I don't understand! Listen.
Keep going with this step until you've at least got a complete
section so you've really had to think and create a full thought.
I wouldn't recommend you go one bar at a time because you're really not going to
be challenging yourself, you're not going to be finding compositional problems to solve,
you're really just kind of going to be guessing at what comes next.
Do a complete section so you actually
have something substantial to compare with in the next step.
Step five compare your work with the original.
And because now you've actually worked with these ideas, you've tried variations,
you've seen where they can go, you're going to be so much more intimately familiar with
them and understand what the composer is doing with them.
You're going to recognize the parts that they've kept, the parts they've left out,
what they've changed, what they've kept the same, and you'll be able to follow some of
the larger form concepts like a long crescendo or understand why an unexpected chord is unexpected.
Write that down.
What's important to focus on here is not just what they did
but also think about why they did it and how they achieved that result.
Toch said "When I compared my efforts with the original I felt crushed. Was I a flea, a mouse,
a little nothing when I compared what I did with what Mozart did."
Better, what do you think?
"But still I did not give up and continued my strange method
to grope along in this way and to force Mozart to correct me.
And he not only replaced for me every living teacher but outdid them all."
Yes I understand. Yes yes. And that's all?