An instructive book for students at all levels and abilities Musical composition is becoming a key discipline in music courses in both schools and universities, and many teachers consider it as important in the development of young musicians as playing and listening to music. Indeed, it can be argued that the study of composition is essential to all musicians, be they performers, musicologists, teachers, or critics, because through composition musicians achieve the deepest insight into the elements of music and the imagination of a composer. Musical Composition: * First takes the student through the basic elements - melody, harmony, counterpoint, and rhythm - before covering a variety of special subjects such as writing vocal and choral music, accompaniments, and film and TV music. * Devotes many chapters to composing with advanced and recent techniques including free diatonicism, bitonality and polytonality, atonality and twelve-note mic, and serialism and indeterminancy. * Uses over 200 music examples to illustrate points in the text, and includes exercises for each chapter.

This guide to the more adventurous evolutions of music since 1945--pointillism, post-Webernism, integral serialism, free dodecaphony, aleatory and indeterminate music, graphics, musique concrete, electronic music, and theatre music--was first published in 1975 and has been reprinted several times. For this second edition, Smith Brindle has added a new chapter reviewing developments over the decade since first publication. He discusses the decline of experimentalism and the reaction against increasing cerebralism and complexity as variously illustrated by the more recent works of Stockhausen, the minimalist works of Reich and Glass, and the partial return to romanticism. He also reviews the technological revolution which has taken place in computer music and concludes that the future of music will for the time being be most closely associated with technological change and development, rather than with radical changes in compositional techniques.

This introductory text for students covers all the most important aspects of serial composition, including full discussion of such topics as melody writing, twelve-note harmony, polyphonic writing, forms, stylistic factors, avant-garde techniques, and free twelve-note composition. The author's intention is to avoid a pedantic exposition of serial principles and to include many technical details which are also valid in non serial contexts, being the common property of contemporary musical languages. Richard Smith Brindle (born 1917) is a native of Lancashire. He studied at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, in Rome at the Academia di Santa Cecilia, and in Florence privately with Dallapiccola. His own music is influenced by he Italian avant-garde school of berio, Maderna, non, and others. From 1970 until his retirement in 1985 he was Professor of Music at the University of Surrey.