The Everyday Musician

Each December of every year, Althea gave her piano students a music composition project. Althea was my beloved piano teacher for 12 years of my youth.

Althea’s annual composition project for her students was simple:  Start with a Christmas carol; keep the chord progression; change the melody to your own.

That’s a good way to get started on your first composing effort.  In this exercise, you focus attention on just melody writing.  The structure of the song, the meter, the harmony, even the key signature, are all given to you.  You just have to come up with a new melody, which is fun!  Of course, you can borrow from other types of non-copyrighted music, not just Christmas carols.

As you write the new melody, you’ll probably be forced to change the rhythms some.  That’s good practice for you to work with both the pitches and they rhythms of the new melody.

I believe that Althea’s method for getting young people started on composing was simply brilliant, that is, brilliant in its simplicity.  I started doing this when I was 8 or 9 and really enjoyed it.  That’s what got me started on a life-long hobby of composing music.

Althea was way ahead of her time some 50 years ago.  She knew that nobody would sue her students for stealing their chord progressions from Christmas carols.  Althea anticipated 50 years ago PG Music’s popular Band-in-a-Box software:  you provide the chord progressions, and then Band-in-a-Box plays a small ensemble accompaniment to which you can improvise a melody.  Althea also anticipated the application of holistic teaching methods in music, at a time when her colleagues were still hitting the fingers of their students with rulers when they hit a wrong note.   (See a blog post about Althea at http://everydaymusician.com/?p=11).