Tell me again the music of that Tale - sketching harmony

There are many composers that, when start composing, know exactly what to do. They might have a pre-planned way of do it. Some type of process that allow them to start and, during the process, find the final and most consistent idea. It can be a conceptual process or a composition technique process differing, of course, from composer to composer.

I am not as the other composers. Every time I start a new piece, it is always a different process of composition, different engagement with other composer’s music, different approaches, different inspirations. Every time I start a new piece it is like I am lost and it takes a specific time to locate my self on the map.

However, you cannot be waiting for Siri to make an automatic location on the map, or for the miracle of the inspiration, and for that reason, I have developed a process that allow me to, in a very beginning, at least, select which will be my harmony - even if in the process of composing I do not use all of it. In a way, it is like creating a playlist in your Spotify: hear different albums, different authors, select the ones you enjoy and upload them into your playlist. You cannot select something if it is unknown. Knowing my harmony first is a process of selection and it does not necessarily means that I know what the piece will be.

The process of knowing my harmony goes, in a first stage, from playing randomly on the piano: chords, melodies, other composer’s music, sequences of notes, transpositions of chords, or just improvising without any criteria. In a second stage, I try to locate them in the harmonic series, understand what is the partial of each note and how it looks as a harmonic series chords (which means having the partials in order - without transposing them). In a third stage, I invert the harmonic series, creating subsequently an opposite pole not only for the harmonic series, but also for the chords. In a fourth stage, I start locating them in the circle of fifths, creating not only a large amount of possible transpositions, but also a notion of how they may be transposed. Sometimes, some of the chords are impossible to transpose, because they do not respect the major or minor triad to be considered tonal. For this reason, sometimes, chords cannot be transposed to their minor relative.

After all these four stages, I have now completed the listening process of all the albums, artists, songs and/or groups to be added on my playlist. However, my playlist is not yet created. There is a process of selection that it is missing.

Having engaged with the harmony does not necessarily means that I know exactly what to do. I am still lost in this piece and I have no idea in what this will become.