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Hoots : How does one compose in a certain style of a musician or musicians? How do you compose in the style of a musician, or musicians that has a peculiar sound, but make it uniquely yours? I want to make my own accompaniment tracks - freshhoot.com

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How does one compose in a certain style of a musician or musicians?
How do you compose in the style of a musician, or musicians that has a peculiar sound, but make it uniquely yours? I want to make my own accompaniment tracks on my keyboard and play in different styles.


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Usually style of music is a result of someone's arrangement of a particular song. A folk song can be arranged to become a classical orchestration or maybe a jazz version. If we study the characteristics of any style of music, we can apply those characteristics to any song we choose and then perform it in that style. This process is not viewed as plagiarism. Often songs are written without thought as to what their style actually might be and then an arranger might take the song and give it the characteristics that define its style. It's pretty rare that we actually hear the original version of a song as it was written.


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Practice and - obviously - composition skills. It's a common task in composition courses to mimic aesthetics, genres or even famous musicians. And modeling is also very common.

For this, in a broader view, you need to know how to "decode" the musical parameters in a given piece or style, find the patterns and create stylish rules and, after this, compose under these set of rules. Or recombine those parameters into new ideas. The possibilities are infinite.

A good book (in classical music) for this is Thinking for Orchestra - Practical Exercises in Orchestration, by René Leibowitz and Jan Maguire. They ask you to orchestrate excerpts of great masters following their own stylistic rules, from Haydn to Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Barber. They give you a piano reduction of harmony and melodies and a brief text about the pieces.

Then you compare your score to originals and try to figure out why they did what they did (or why you chose a different path). Hard to do but immensely rewarding.

Not for total beginners, but easy to reach this level - a quick reading of any orchestration manual before will fit, and basic knowledge of harmony and counterpoint.


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