Composing music - where to start?

When composing music, it certainly does no harm if one experiments with small exercises. Classical composers had to write scores of minuets—however, nowadays this is a little bit out of fashion. What could we take instead? Here is a suggestion: Write ragtimes.

The best-known ragtime is certainly Scott Joplin's "Entertainer," made famous again by its use in "The Clou" with Paul Newman and Robert Redford (the soundtrack with many other melodies by Scorr Joplin earned an Oscar). John Williams's Cantina Theme from the first Star Wars film is another very famous ragtime, which deviates quite a lot from the old standard ragtime harmonies and chords. Even though the heyday of ragtime has ended a century ago, this music is still attractive enough to be played by some band in every other Clone War series ...

Before writing a ragtime, it probably makes sense to listen to a few rags. Warren Trachtman's site has lots of ragtime MIDIs, and certainly there are enough of them on youtube. However, I found that after listening to fifteen or twenty ragtimes, my musical mind gets somehow clogged up and cannot produce anything intelligible any more—so turn them off soon enough ...

Here is a "recipe" for assembling a ragtime on the typical ragtime instrument, the piano:

1. Take some piece of melody and add enough syncopation.
2. For the accompaniment, use a simple stride on the first and the fifth. In the final part of a phrase, the fifth of the fifth (dominant seventh on the second) fits in quite well.
3. The simplest form of a ragtime is a - a', i.e., a melody, then a slight variation on the melody.
4. After having put together the first version, one should brush up two more melodies: The bass line, i.e., the bass notes of the stride, should become a melody of its own; and longer notes in the main melody can be used to add small counter-melody pieces.
5. A longer form like A-B-A will have place for another melodic idea; or one might even write a long "ragtime rondo" A-B-A-C-A-D-...
6. And that's it!

That's it? But how do you do this exactly? I fear that this question could only be answered in a personal dialogue: Because what needs to be explained or tried out depends very much on what one can do and can't do. The important part is, of course, the second step—harmonization: No shortcuts there! It must simply be done correctly—something that needs training. I do not really know how you learn it, but all people who can do it (myself included) have told me that it takes long, and it needs some teacher. Of course, playing and listening to standard blues is a first step where one learns to hear whether a chord is correct or not, but the few blues chords and chord sequences are not enough training.

However, when you feel somewhat confident with ragtime harmonics, you can of course start all sorts of substitution attempts, leading to more and more jazz-like music: Besides notated ragtime, improvised ragtime was the bed on which jazz started to flourish, where the pianist can more or less bravely digress from the standard I-IV-V(-II) harmonies. Tritone substitutions are most probably going too far for a ragtime, but everything else is certainly worth some trials.

After so many words, there should be some notes. Therefore, for your pleasure (or not), here is an academically constructed part of a ragtime.

The idea for the melody is a simple scale: Up and down. I "invented" it in half a minute while waiting for my train—alternative: assemble it on the piano (or whatever instrument you play):

So that we get a ragtime, we syncopate it—different syncopations in bars one and two are better than just one rhythm! At the end, I tacked on another note to fill up the second bar:

Below our melody, we add a standard stride:

What next? Either we continue with the melody. A simple second part would be a "sequence" (same melody on another note) from which we divert at some point:

Another idea: We continue the bass line. And when we do this, we can leave the boring standard stride and go for some "bass melody" or "bass line." Here is one—the last bar contains the fifth-of-the-fifth or dominant-II I mentioned above:

Using this bass as "input", we must now add some matching melody—"wherever the fingers go" (on the keyboard or in ones head). Here is one of many possibilities:

Done with the first part! Well ... we can look at some old harmonic and counterpoint rules and repair a few glitches:

• At [1], we nicely jump into an eighth (both voices lead from lower notes to an f); possible fix: The upper voice jumps to the a, then "somehow finds its way back." Another possibility: a instead of c as first note. This leads to a counterpoint between accompaniment and melody, and has the additional nice effect that after the very straightforward up-and-down scale suddenly an unexpected high note is introduced.
• At [2], we jump into an fifth (voices go in parallel to c+g); possible fix: bass uses e instead of c.
• At [3]: The d# must, of course, find e as its resolution. However, if we want to repeat the melody (a-a' form), we need a c! Possible fix: We repeat the melody one third higher! Or, more conventional: Replace d#" with g".

Here is an improved version that shows a few of the suggested fixes in red. At the end, I attached an a' part which loops back to the tonic I. In bar 6, the introduction of a new harmony on the off-beat is somewhat questionable—however, I'd like to argue that this works because of the subsequent resolution to a-minor and the accompaniment chord sequence in bar 7: But this might all be questioned. However, this is why there is that "composer in charge"—she or he decides what stays and what not.

And now? Honestly, I'm somewhat lost now: There are no rests or long notes in the melody, so there is little room for counter-melodies. A band arrangement could add a calm middle voice for reeds or flutes, but on the piano this would sound somewhat strange. I leave it at that.

Should we do harmonic analysis now? No—certainly not! We want to compose, not to analyze! But what, then, is this argument that one has to learn all these chords and chord sequences when composing? I repeat: Forget that—no need to know all that. Of course, if you know such things, it will help you to "repair" pieces to make them "better" (according to some rule you want to follow) or, more important, more interesting.

But much more important than knowing these harmonic rules and notations is being able to hear harmonies: "Understand" what's "right" and "wrong" and "good" and "bad" and "normal" and "daring". How you get there, I do not know. Listening (to simple classical music and marches!) and playing (simple classics, straightforward gospel arrangements) and getting criticized is the way to go ... which, I confess, is not really an answer.