Hello this is Mike Hayes and I'd like to welcome you to our video
on music composition; on this video we'll look at some of the
creative ways we can approach the subject of writing music, the
main focus of this video will be about geometrical inversions. So
before we get right into the actual writing of the music I'd just
like to explain the concept of geometrical inversions when we're
doing music composition. geometrical inversions is a thematic
development tool. it's a way of presenting the one musical idea
four different ways; as you experiment with the techniques and
the concepts that I'll present in this video you'll find that
certain inversions of your melody will be more expressive or have
a more interesting character. To show you how this works I'm just
going to ask you to image that this line represents the pitch
element of my melody and underneath here I'll mark in the
rhythmic pattern, so this is the original presentation of my
melody, it's just going to be a one bar melody at the moment; so
we'll call this section "A", this is the original presentation of
our theme. The "B" inversion of this melody would be to play the
exact same thing only backwards, like this, this would be the
pitch element and the rhythmic element would be presented like
this ...
so this is the "B" inversion. The "C" inversion of the
melody would be the same as the original only this time it would
not only be backwards but it would be upside down; like this.
here is the rhythm I'm marking in, so this would be inversion
"C"; it's essentially like we're looking in a puddle of water and
we're seeing a reflection, the "C" inversion is a reflection of
the "B" inversion. And finally, the "D" inversion of our melody
would be exactly the same as our original melody in the "A"
position only this time it would be upside down, so this is how
it would look ... and just marking in our rhythms again, and as
you can see the "D" inversion is a reflection of the original
theme, the "A" section. O. K, now what I've done I've transferred
our original sketch over on to music paper so my first theme is
just a very scale-like theme, I'm starting on a C note, D and
then E that's the pitch element and if you'll recall we had this
rhythmic pattern of 2+1+1. Now, to write in the "B" inversion
it's just simply going to be the exact same original theme only
backwards. So we'll start by writing in a one beat E, followed
by a one beat D and then finishing on a two beat C. O. K I
think it's pretty easy to see what I've done there
but it will give you a different melody. Our next project is to
show you how we can workout how to get an exact reflection of
our original theme when we invert the melody in the "C" position and
the "D" position. Now, to find our exact reflection in the melody
for our inversion "C" and inversion "D" I'm going to begin by
marking in our axis point the C, and I'm actually going to work
on the "D" inversion firstly it's just a little bit easier to show
you that first. So, the note C will remain exactly the same for
the "d" inversion, however, what I'm wanting to do now is measure
how far away is the second note in our melody from the note
C and if I go down to the keyboard here I can see it's a distance
of two semitones, so to find the mirror image of the melody in
the "A" section what i do I measure down two semitones from C and
that would give me the note Bb; there's my C and now I'm going to
mark in the note Bb, the next note in my original melody is a distance
of one, two, three, four semitones from the keynote C so
now I'm going to measure down four notes to find it's equivalent
in the "d" inversion so measuring down four semitones:
one, two. three, four gives me the note Ab, and I'm just going to
mark in the note Ab, and there we have the "D" inversion completed,
and now having completed the "D" inversion it makes it very
easy to ah, complete the "C" inversion because the "C" inversion
is just the same as "D" only it's moving in the opposite direction
so now I'll be able to have Ab, Bb and my C for two beats
and there we have it! That's the very first steps to creating a
melody using geometrical inversions and we've been working
on music composition and I hope you found this useful,
in other videos I'll take this a lot further and we'll go
into how do we work out the harmonies because obviously that will
have a very great effect on the emotional response from the
listener. This is Mike Hayes and I hope youhave enjoyed the video.