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KeyboardMag.com >> This Month >> Motivic Manipulation
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Composing Motivic Manipulation| January, 2006“I like putting little hidden treasures in songs,” says Hiromi. “I play a lot with motifs.” Even a single motif — defined by the Oxford Dictionary of Music as “the shortest intelligible and self-existent melodic or rhythmic figure” — can provide composers with lots of creative possibilities. A short melody can be inverted or stretched, for example, or thickened or thinned out to create variation. Similarly, a distinctive rhythmic figure can be mellowed or intensified to provide a textural change. When it comes down to it, the key to creative motivic manipulation is the same as the key to good synth tweaking — find a nugget of something you like and screw with it until you like it even better. In the four-part suite “Music for Three-Piece-Orchestra” off of her new album Spiral (Telarc), Hiromi introduces multiple motifs, plays with them, then superimposes them on top of each other, creating intricate new hidden treasures. One example from the first section, “Open Door — Tuning — Prologue,” starts with the bass motif in Example 1 and can be heard at 2:35 in the track. Example 2 shows the second major motif she uses in the first movement — you can hear it happen at 5:01. While the motif doesn’t reoccur note for note, its shape, essential chord structure, and left-hand patterns do emerge again later in the movement. Listen at 8:50 and check out Example 3 to see how. “I use the chord progression [from the second motif] and the bass line of the first theme as a melody,” says Hiromi. The result is a rich musical phrase that is reminiscent of earlier moments in the piece, but has a character all of its own. To play with motivic superimpositions like this in your own compositions, try coming up with two separate musical snippets — rhythmic figures, chord progressions, short melodies, whatever — and see what creative variations you can come up with. After exploring the possibilities of each motif individually, see what magic you can discover by placing different variations on top of each other, say, combining the rhythms of one with the melody of the other. If you feel stuck, stick on Spiral for inspiration. |
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