The System of Composing a Piece of Music

I asked John Woodall this question:

I want to jump to composing a piece of music. I think it’s more of a system-type thinking approach that you’ve got this grand idea, and you look at this big picture, but then you’ve got to start writing this single note to start out with something. It’s like you’re starting with this big blank piece of paper to create this system. How does that process work? When you start with that piece, do you have a theme?

In 1989, John formed the company Powerof2Music and has since scored over 500 episodes of television such as “I Love the 80?s, I Love the 90?s, Abducted, True Crime, Manhunt, Ghosthunters (original), Command Decisions, iDetective and more. Today, John’s passion for music and film remains a strong and driving force in his continuing to push the envelope of scoring for picture.

John’s answer:

John Woodall: I want to quote the late, great Jerry Goldsmith. I went to one of his lectures; I went to several of them, but I went to this particular one. I was completely blown away to hear him say, ‘I might spend the first 2 days of my 20-day budget just to find the right tempo, how fast or how slow this is.’ I couldn’t believe that when I first heard that, because I would just think, boom, I could just go to something, but he was so right in the subtleties, tempo and speed and what they do to a body and what they evoke.

If I’m sitting here, which I do at times, and say, well, I’ve got this idea – well, let’s be real, I’m working on an idea now and that is I have written so much action, all this sort of music, and minor and I’ve done a lot of songwriting, but now what I’m going to do is I’m writing a sacred piece of music. What I call ‘sacred’ music, and that could be anything from Mozart to some sort of nice music, let’s say.

The process that is in my mind is this, and that’s that I have this feeling of it. I have no idea how to start it, and I have no idea how to end it. I’ve got some good middle ideas in my head, thinking of the flow from the beginning to the end. I do know that it has to start out a certain way and that I need to set the scene even though it is a piece of music, sacred music. It’s only to set you up, the listener up, and I’m not sure how that’s going to happen. In my mind right now, I’m thinking it’s going to be haunting, beautiful, a little bit listless, romantic and a little bit dark. So, I might hear and throw away 99 ideas before I reach one. I might even throw that away later if I hate it and hope that maybe it will stimulate something else.

As I sit here with those words in my mind, I can start playing, and while I might play a bunch of junk or inappropriate or whatever, especially if I’m frustrated, I might just play something completely different. Eventually, I’m going to hit upon a phrase or a melody that strikes me as the right one, or at least indicative of what I am trying to say. And so from there I’ll build, and it is a very much build, reconstruct, build, reconstruct. I may find that I’ve written, let’s say the piece has ten sections. Of the seven sections that I have written right now, I may put them together and realize later that I hate section three and four. I would remove it and leave holes, and then come back to those and try to finish it and sometimes work from beginning to end, meaning I can take it from note one to the very last note.

But as I said, usually a composer, like myself, I want to make a distinction between – there’re several different types of composers, but a composer like myself, as I said, I can see something in my mind. If I can feel it, it might be even better, in my mind from beginning to end, but I start in the middle, I may work any which way.

Some of the other types of composers – a long-time business partner, Buddy Hendrickson, who was for a long time a session drummer in Los Angeles, played with everybody on tons of people’s records, he’s a brilliant composer. Because he’s a percussionist, he sees things in rhythm. I’m a string guy. I have a degree in string arranging, horns. I think in different sorts of rhythm. I think moving the piece of music through brass and strings, and he thinks moving the piece of music through drums, and because he’s playing, you know, because he’s piano playing, or because he’s string playing of some sort. Buddy, for example, he would go from beginning to end. Now, he didn’t have any notes; he had the rhythm of the entire let’s say the 50 minute piece, from beginning to end. This is what I want; this is how I want this thing to go.

There is what I call the bottom end composers, the trombone players, the Rick Walshes, the Don Davis’. Don Davis did ‘The Matrix’. These are brass players who think of a score through power, subtlety and power, and where are my power spots in the score? So, they may line up the entire 30 minutes of. I need to hit it here, here, here, it needs to be subtle and beautiful like that. Then, they’ll start writing around that. So, again, I can only talk about my own process of being around these people.

This week’s Podcast guest Jim Kalbach, is a Principal UX Designer with Citrix Online and an active speaker, writer, and instructor on business design, user experience, and information architecture. In the interview, Jim’s take on systems architecture and music composition.

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