Composing Dance Tunes

This set of notes was first used at the Stafford Music Day in 2006.

Some painters say that they always slap some paint on a new canvas straight away, rather than looking at a blank canvas and panicking because they have no idea where to start. It's just as bad writing a short story, or an article — or a tune. Where do you start?

If you just have a vague feeling of “I'd like to write a tune” (or paint a picture, or build a house, or whatever) it probably won't happen. You need to get specific. I want to write a bouncy Irish-type jig. I want to write a stately Playford-type reel. I want to write a tune for this specific dance.

But there's an exception to this: when you're sitting at the piano, your fingers wandering idly over the noisy keys… and you think “That sounds good”! Always have pencil and manuscript paper handy, and write it down — it doesn't matter how much of a scribble it is, so long as you can read it. It's very difficult to strike a balance between writing down what you've just played and composing the next bit; many's the time I've composed the next bit and then found I had forgotten the first bit. Try not to be too critical: this is brainstorming, where first you get down all the ideas that might be floating around in your head. Later you can fit them together, improve some, discard others. Incidentally, I use manuscript paper which already has a treble clef and eight bars on each line — it saves time and makes it easier to jump from line to line when I have several possibilities at some points.

Whichever of these two approaches you adopt, you will know what style you're working with. It might help to start with an existing tune in a similar style. You can copy elements of it — that's how you make sure it's within a particular style — but don't follow it too closely — that's called plagiarism! Don't suddenly switch styles in the middle of the tune — if it's a traditional-sounding tune and you suddenly throw in a couple of weird chords it will make people (including the musicians playing it) uncomfortable. Try lots of ideas. I will often play over a short phrase of music twenty times, making slight changes, until (maybe) I'm satisfied with it.

Most of my early compositions were songs, composed at the guitar. At one time I composed using an electronic organ, and there was a distinct danger that they would turn out as hymn tunes! Now I compose at the piano. Occasionally an idea comes into my mind while I don't have an instrument available, in which case I write it down as best I can.

There are two sides to any sort of creation: the creative and the mechanical. If you're a painter you probably need to know how to mix your paints, how perspective works, how shadows look, and so on. If you're writing music you probably need to know about keys, chords, musical phrases, sequences and so on. The trick is to get this to be part of your vocabulary so that it all happens subconsciously, leaving you free to do the creative part. If you have the discipline but aren't creative, you'll probably come up with something that's technically correct but rather boring. And if you're merely creative, without any discipline behind it, I don't think you'll come up with a good dance tune either. Often I have an initial idea — not necessarily the first few bars; it might be part-way through the tune. If I'm lucky I have some more inspiration later on. The rest of it is often sheer slog, but because I have a background in this sort of music it has more chance of working. Don't try to write in a style that you don't like; you probably won't be successful.

Enough of the generalities! Let me give you some specific rules, and then we'll see what you can come up with.

Start with a straightforward format. Choose your rhythm, and write a 32-bar tune consisting of an 8-bar A-music repeated and an 8-bar B-music repeated. Stick to one key, or possibly modulate to the dominant (or the relative major or minor) towards the end of the A-music and get back to the tonic by the end of the B-music.

Play through some tunes you like, and try to analyse what makes them satisfying: phrase patterns, rhythm patterns, harmony patterns, chord sequences, bass line or whatever.

Give the tune variety but not too much variety — a good tune has coherence. I once wrote a tune consisting of two-bar phrases from eight Playford dances. It may have been clever, but it wasn't a good tune! A good tune sounds as if it knows where it's going, without being too predictable. It should be reasonably obvious that the A and B parts belong together. Maybe there's a musical phrase or rhythm at the start of the A-music and you can use this at the end of the B-music to tie things together.

It's a good idea if the tune sounds as if it's finishing at the end of the B-music, and doesn't sound as if it's finishing at the end of the A-music, though there are plenty of exceptions to the second idea — some tunes finish the A and B parts with the same two-bar phrase.

Decide if there is any stepping to be done to their tune. This should help with phrasing and rhythm. A good tune announces clearly that it requires a march around or skip or whatever.

Use a gimmick if you think you have a good reason, but don't overuse it.

If you've written a good phrase of music, one obvious trick is to repeat the phrase one note (or more) lower (or higher). This is called a sequence, and it's perilously easy to get hooked on one. Suppose you'd just written the first two bars of “Jenny, come tie my cravat” (Playford's original three-time tune, not the one Sharp used for the dance). It's in D, and it starts and ends on F#. It would be very natural so repeat the same phrase starting on E, and that's exactly what the composer did. It's then far too easy to repeat it again on D, but that's a bad idea. I think it was Bach who said that you could use a musical phrase twice, but the third time you had to do something different with it. In this case the composer went back to starting the phrase on the F#, but this time it ended by going up rather than down, and he rounded out the eight bars with something much higher and quite different. You might think the composer did get away with a third occurrence in the B-music of the Christmas carol “Angels from the Realms of Glory”, but don't take this as an example to follow. An even more dubious example is the B-music of another carol: “Ding Dong Merrily on High”.

Don't expect to get the tune right first time, and in the early stages be more concerned with getting the notes down than getting them perfect. I can use up a whole page of manuscript paper for just one tune, with several possibilities for each line, and I keep trying them all and changing them until I'm satisfied or I give up completely. And on many occasions I have hit a wrong note and thought “Oh, what did I do then!” — and it's become part of the tune.

If you're writing a tune for a specific dance, think about the dance moves which go to the tune. A musician looked at my tune “Helena” and said “Is there a set in bars 5 and 6 of the A-music?” — and indeed there is. Look at my tune for “Dutch Crossing”. It starts with a 16-bar A-music — because the movement is 16 bars long. The dance starts with two changes of a circular hey, so I put in a gap between bars 2 and 3, but then four changes of a straight hey, so there's no gap between bars 6 and 7. When it comes to the “Dutch Crossing” part (the hardest part of the dance) I didn't want the music getting in the way of the flow of the dance, so the C-music is absolutely regular four beats to the bar. And the D-music needs to fit two 4-bar moves each time, so there's a gap at the end of bars 4 and 8. I'm not saying that all tunes fit the dances as closely as this, but I certainly thought hard about what I wanted the tune to do as I was writing it. In fact I originally learnt a wrong version of the dance, and had to modify my tune to fit the correct version!

Don't forget that you're writing dance music, and the dancers need to be comfortable with the phrases of music they are dancing to. There are tunes where bars 7 and 8 of the A-music sound as if they are the start of the next line rather than the ending of this line, and people get confused. “The Designing Woman” in Gary Roodman's book “Sum Further Calculated Figures” has a circle left in the last four bars of the B-music — but the tune doesn't come to a close there. The first time I called it I stopped the band, convinced that I'd got the timing wrong. Notice that on the recording by MGM and Reunion, they've changed the music so that it does come to a close at this point! There are tunes in waltz time where some or all of the four-bar phrases start on the bar before the one you would expect — a classic example is the Country and Western “Annie's Song” by John Denver.

Think about what key to write it in, and whereabouts on the stave the notes should fall. I never go below the G below the treble stave, because that's the bottom note on a fiddle (though flute and recorder players complain when I go below middle C), and I don't normally use more than one ledger line above the stave. I have no urge to write tunes in E flat since I wouldn't be able to play them, but do try to avoid writing everything in G. Just by starting in a different key you'll find that new ideas come into your head. If you discover that the B-music goes up into the stratosphere you can always change the key later, but while the creative processes are working don't interfere with them by doing a mundane job such as transposition.

Some people talk about graphing the emotional intensity of a tune, but I'm afraid I don't think that way. If you want a rule, try putting the highest note of the tune in bar 4 of the B-music, giving you four bars to get back on a level again!

Chords — that's a whole different area. You can play safe with tonic, dominant and subdominant, and if you're writing a traditional-sounding tune that might well be best. Relative minors are pretty safe, though watch out that you don't make the tune too gloomy (unless you want a gloomy tune). One approach (which I've never tried) is to start with a chord sequence and then write the tune to fit this — it just might help you if you've been staring at that blank sheet of manuscript paper for far too long. I'm keen on diminished chords (a music theorist would say “diminished seventh chords”) but most dance composers don't use them and plenty of bands simply won't play them. On occasions I've used major seventh, minor seventh, augmented, half-diminished (though I would describe it as an A minor with an F# bass), suspensions and maybe others. Don't use them just because they're there, but because they bring out the sound you want. And be aware that someone will have to play this stuff!

And one final bit of advice: put it away and play it through tomorrow. What you thought was a masterpiece may well be rubbish, but it's difficult to be critical when you're in the throes of composition. Maybe most of it is fine, but there are a couple of points where it just doesn't work. Maybe you can improve these. Maybe you'll just have to lose that really nice phrase because it doesn't fit in with the rest of the tune. This is a really important part of the job. It may take more time that the original composition, but it can make all the difference between a tune that is OK and a really good tune that people will want to play and dance to.

For those who really want an in-depth view of the creative process as it relates to dance music, here's an account of how I wrote the tune to Unrequited Love. (By the way, the reason I'm talking mainly about my own tunes is not that I think they're better than anyone else's, but that I know them well and sometimes remember my creative processes.)

On this occasion I started with the first two bars of the tune. Repeated notes on the bar-line can be banal — think of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” — but across the bar-line they can have an emotional impact. As I played the phrase, thirds below seemed an obvious thing to add to the melody. It was natural to repeat this phrase as a sequence a third below. It was then very tempting to repeat it a third below that, but bearing in mind Bach's advice I expanded it into a four bar phrase which did something different — though again the repeated note across the bar-line. [Here I would demonstrate it without the expansion, and then with it.] That gave me my first eight bars A1, ending with a suspension on the dominant chord. The next eight bars immediately sprang to mind — A2, repeating the first six bars less one note and ending on the tonic note and chord.

Now I had to do something different, but related, as I came to the so-called “middle eight”, so I started with the dominant chord. This time it's a four-bar phrase, but notice that the second half is the original two-bar phrase again. The natural follow-up to this is of course a sequence, but this time a third above rather than a third below, so the middle eight has a rising feeling to it.

My first thought at this point was to repeat A2, giving a 32-bar tune. But that didn't really have enough to it. So again I went for something different, this time starting on the subdominant chord. Although it's different, it starts with a near-variant of the original two-bar phrase, and again in bars 5 and 7. Having added this eight bar phrase (C) I felt justified in copying B as D (with the addition of an augmented chord on the last note) and copying A2 as E.

It didn't all happen quite as logically as this — there were several other attempts. The coda came from a different version of the tune which I'd started, put away and forgotten. It's more dramatic — we meet the only accidental in the entire tune, and this is over a diminished chord. The sound is restless, confused, as if the tune doesn't know where it's going for a moment. I rediscovered this and thought “I've got to use that somewhere”. I once danced “Unrequited Love” to Barbara Kinsman's calling, and she said of the coda, “This is the point where I always think the tune has gone wrong”. Fortunately the band was Wild Thyme, who had recorded it on their “Hunter's Moon” album, and they assured Barbara that it didn't sound as if it had gone wrong to them! Notice that the last two bars are the original motif yet again — coherence to the end.