As you sit down with a sharpened #2 pencil and a clean sheet of manuscript paper, the most basic question arises: How should I approach the task of composing for the guitar? If you are a guitarist-or a composer who chooses to write for the instrument-the guitar is your voice. Just as you engage your mind in specific ways when speaking, so too when sitting down to write a piece, a mode of thinking can help that blank sheet of manuscript paper come alive with music.

In general, the best approach is to not "think" too much. I would suggest that the conscious mind is not the place where music comes from. Instead, let your thoughts wander and try getting into a state of mind where you make decisions about what to preserve in a rapid, intuitive way. Remember: when first writing down music, nothing is wrong. Later, of course, you may decide to edit the music-add or delete things-but at first, all ideas should be respected and considered as possible kernels for a new piece of music.

There are 2 essential ways of approaching composition: 1) the hands-on or intuitive approach and 2) the intellectual approach. This is not to say that these approaches do not overlap in certain ways, but they offer a good way of conceptualizing the first basic acts of composition. Let me say a bit about each.

The hands-on or intuitive approach has 2 stages. The first stage takes place with instrument in hand and the player/composer idly improvising. Perhaps you're in the midst of a practice session and after playing scales and exercises with a high amount of mental focus, your mind begins to drift and finger memory takes over. You suddenly realize that you are playing a chord progression or a melody over and over and, in fact, you like what you hear. You decide to write down this music. Even in these early moments of composition, using musical notation accurately is essential. A good test is to have a friend play your musical ideas or try playing what you have written after a day passes. It's a good sign if it sounds the same as it did the day before. As an additional benefit, this practice will greatly improve your knowledge of written music and will definitely help your sight-reading.

Working in this way will naturally force limitations on your new piece; it will be fashioned by your experience as well as by the "burned-in" memory of your fingers when you play. Limitations are often a good thing in composition. The guitar as an instrument poses its own natural limitations. For instance, the guitar is good at making nicely voiced harmonies- as long as you know how to voice them so they are playable. The guitar has the possibility of coloring melodies with a broad palette-depending on which strings you use to play them. The guitar does not like to sustain notes for long periods yet it can play polyphonic music, most effectively in two voices.

The second stage of the hands-on or intuitive approach is connecting and extending these written-out improvisations and ideas. Putting your musical ideas into a form is a new challenge and there are many ways and many styles of doing this. I can recommend two books (there are many good ones) which can help generate ideas:

Twentieth-Century Harmony: Creative Aspects and Practice (W. W. Norton & Co.: New York, 1961) by Vincent Persichetti deals mainly with orchestral music; however, the techniques and ideas given in the many musical examples are very helpful.

Many recent compositional trends are nicely organized in Techniques of the Contemporary Composer (Schirmer Books: New York, 1997) by David Cope.

Of course, while books are a convenient source of ideas, not all good ideas are found in books. The piece you write is your own and there is nothing to say it has to be like any other piece. One can just as successfully compose a 20-minute chaconne as a 20-second wandering melodic figure.

The intellectual approach to composition takes place away from the instrument. Composers like to play games to discover fresh relationships, and these kinds of activities drive this approach. An example of this approach is the 12-tone music made famous by Arnold Schoenberg, which makes a game of using all 12 chromatic notes organized in specific ways. Another example is aleatoric music where-as in rolling dice-the will of the composer is minimized. Several 20th century composers used this method and even Mozart and other classical composers wrote music using dice.

Music composed using the intellectual approach can help to expand your mind and strengthen your musical ear. Let me give a brief example. I am a big fan of Morse code- those long and short beeps we hear in disaster movies as the communications officer frantically calls for help. As a teen, I benefited from Mel Bay's Modern Guitar Method so I translated the name "Mel Bay" into Morse code. With dashes for longs and dots for shorts, here is how it comes out:

The first step in creating a piece of music is to turn these dots and dashes into rhythmic values. I have chosen to let the dashes translate to either dotted quarter notes or quarter notes and the dots to eighth notes:

There are many ways to make a melody using this rhythm but in this case I wanted to use my 12-sided die (available at most game and hobby shops; no composer should be without one!). I choose to let the number 1 on the die signify the pitch A, 2 is Bb, 3 is B, etc. Here is the actual melody I came up with using the die:

With some sensitive playing, this melody is not bad but it would be nice to add some things to it. I want to add a bass line, and some phrasing, as well as set a tempo and general effect to the whole. The resulting piece has a rhythmic lilt and, though brief, goes through some nice changes before its contemplative final chord.

Your assignment is to compose two 16-bar pieces for solo guitar: the first using the hands-on or intuitive approach, the second using an intellectual approach (not necessarily the one above but you can use it as a starting point) where you design the technique before seeing how it works for the guitar.

I hope you make interesting if not beautiful music!
David Hahn