Musical Contrasts and Transitions

A few weeks ago, I wrote a lengthy article about one fundamental concept of music which is Tension and Resolution which applies in music from the smallest units to the largest forms.

A similarly important concept is the duality between musical contrasts and transitions. Interestingly, both dualities mentioned above are often overlooked by learning composers and orchestrators. The problem in general when you're learning to write music is to get used to looking at the music from different points of view. It is very easy to get lost in one harmonic transition or one melodic movement and forget about stepping back and validating whether what one just did still fits into the large picture.

One of the things that I see most often with inexperienced composers is the loss of focus on the concept that I want to talk about today. 

Music is all about its flow. Be it the flow from one chord to the next, or from one melodic gesture to the next, or from one texture to the next, or from one rhythmical idea to the next. All these things and some more define whether a piece feels like it is moving smoothly or feeling jerky.

An essential thing to understand and realize here is that it is incredibly important to be aware about what you want to do with the musical decision that you're just making as one of the most unmusical things is being inconsequent whether you want something to flow in a transitional way or to break in a contrasting way.

Let's look at both possibilities separately:

Contrast:

A musical contrast can create a fantastic musical cesura, it can surprise the audience or spark a feeling of excitement or even disorientation and nauseousnes. They often serve as dramaturgic pillars. From a musical standpoint there are a lot of possibilities to create a contrast. The most basic ones would be the following dualities listed below. If you place musical material that differs between the two properties right next to each other, you will create a musical contrast.

• high and low
• loud and soft
• rhythmically active and rhythmically calm
• bright and dark
• fast and slow

Additionally, contrasts can be created also through more "sophisticated" measures, like using remote chords or even switching tonality, or switching the texture or use of instruments, or even by switching the musical vocabulary (e.g. switching from clear tonality to atonality or less extreme from simple triads to complex chords).

The problem that I often see with music by inexperienced composers is that they don't trust their own idea. Often, it is clear that they want to go for a musical contrast somewhere but are not courageous enough to go all in with it. Depending on how stark you want the contrast to be, it is a good idea to combine several of the properties above to make it into a bold statement. But more often I see halfhearted contrasts with even elements of transition because the composer had the feeling that they wanted to create a contrast but were not fully aware of it. Often contrasts that are written like this end up in a sort of "musical limbo" where for the audience it feels like a bump in the road but not like a intended turn of direction. In general, make sure that you musically communicate your intention properly to your audience. One of the worst things you can do is make your audience feel indifferent about your musical intention.

Transition:

While the desire to create harsh musical contrasts in music usually is quite rare and will very quickly wear off if overdone, transitioning from one musical idea to the next is usually the most appropriate thing to do. However, it is one of the most underestimated things by learning composers. Very often, you can find jerky switches from one musical idea to the next one. Most often, this problem can be observed between musical sections where very often on the barline there is a radical change in many parameters happening that completely breaks the musical flow.

As an example, there might be a piece that consists of an A theme and a B section which follows right away. Let's make it simple and say Theme A plays from Bar 1-8 and B from 9-16. The A theme is structured well, and played by the Horns with staccato string chords providing the harmonic backdrop and maybe some percussion. The B theme is from it's character contrasting (as often seen in Film themes) so let's say it's a lyrical side theme that is played by the violins and the other strings and maybe some woodwinds as harmonic support. Now what I often see is that with the barline from bar 8 to 9, the composers change everything at once. The staccato strings stop and take over the legato melody, the woodwinds enter with the downbeat of bar 9.

In spite of the fact that the themes are contrasting in character, they are not destined to be separated by a conscious exaggerated contrast as discussed above. But what will happen at this barline will feel extremely unmusical to the audience. Switching so many musical parameters at the same time is creating such a detached feeling between the two sections that they will almost feel like they don't belong together.

A general rule of thumb is to usually avoid trying to change color with the downbeat of a bar. If we get back to our imaginary example from above, it would create a way more musical transition between the sections if in bar 8 the strings would already switch to a "pickup" of legato playing and the woodwinds would enter before bar 9 to telegraph the colour change. Depending on whether this works, the horns that were playing the A theme could also overlap into bar 9. In a way you create a "musical crossfade" between the textures.

Taking this concept further, you should do these things also on the musical parameters. Let's say you want to transition between a section that is more driven by long notes into a section that is rhythmically more active. Just switching on the downbeat again will feel very disconnected. So the more musical choice would be to gradually build up the rhythmical momentum before the switch to the new section so that it feels plausible.

The interesting thing is that many of these things happen subconsciously anyway when you write music and feel like a default but as long as you don't pull these things into your consciousness at least for a while to specifically focus whether all the parameters match, you might always end up with compositions where you feel that something might be not too great with them but you can't quite point your finger at it.

If you have been following me for a while, you know that I rant about writing music in DAWs quite often and here's one more reason. The tendency to write/record/play in passages in sections and working with events in an arrange window encourages the problem of struggling with transitions. You need to consciously make an effort to stitch sections together in a DAW which many composers either are not aware of or don't want to dedicate the time. So they often end up with pieces that feel like a row of "Patterns".

So it really is worth focusing a bit on these things when writing to be consequent about a musical decision. Transition that feel jerky or contrasts the feel halfhearted are a big reason why a musical dramaturgy of a piece doesn't work or why something seemingly won't fit together properly. So putting some extra work into these things really pays off.

If you have been following my composition screencasts recently, you will find a few passages where I talk about these things specifically in the context of a piece.