This monograph is a simple instructional manual in the techniques I have used to compose classical music.

I am a self-taught composer but I am also a Spotify Best Of Artist so I think my results payed off.

You can hear my classical music by listening to my albums, The Gothic Preludes, Transcendent, Impressions and Metaphorica on all major streaming platforms.

The techniques are simple—even a child can learn them—but it would probably take a few years of composing to get up to a level where the compositions would be subtle.

It’s not the technique or manner which is the problem, it’s the ear experience.

It takes time to develop a critical ear and only time can solve this problem.

Without much ado, let’s start.

I’ve often read that you should study the scores of the great composers.

In my opinion, you should actually listen to music, and I mean a lot.

I listen to around 50,000 hours of music a year.

Surprisingly, I don’t listen to much classical music but more metal and techno.

During my creative classical music writing phase, I listened to a lot of symphonic metal, in particular, Nightwish.

It is no exaggeration to say that Tuomas Holopainen was a great influence on my decision to compose classical music in my 40s and I was honoured to see Nightwish one day after my 50th birthday in Toronto.

Classical music is within everyone’s reach.

You just need a little confidence and a few tips to start.

The reason you should listen to more music than read about it is to develop your sense of musical aesthetics.

For me, music composition is not so much about thinking of an idea but of finding and feeling what comes next after a passage of music.

The creativity is the ongoing exploration of the original motif.

It’s not, for me, a gallery exhibit.

In terms of what you listen to, you should listen to what you like.

After many years of composing, you’ll discover that your personal style is just a mirror of what you like, generally speaking.

So, what is classical music?

I define it roughly as relative straight music using little syncopation, that more or less uses major and minor scales and is played by instruments from a Western orchestra.

Many people will differ with this definition but that’s okay.

For me, it’s a working phrase to describe music from the time of Vivaldi to Prokofiev.

However, my working definition is no accident.

After having composed hundreds of songs in many different styles, “classical music” ended up being that.

On a compositional level, I don’t elevate classical music above any other genre.

It simply has its own set of characteristics and guidelines.

This is something you should remember if you feel could never write that kind of music.

Er, no. You can.

Let’s now dive right into it.

Many people use scorewriters to compose and many more compose by hand.

I am in no way against anything you might enjoy doing.

For me, I use a digital audio workstation and only use scorewriters to print my music.

I think if Mozart were alive today, he would use a DAW and not waste time writing out his music.

Back then composers had no choice.

They had to write out their music by hand to record it.

Today, we have better options.

As for actual composing within a DAW, the loop option is your best friend.

Almost everything I compose is done through looping and improvising, which is why my music has the natural quality that it does.

I will compose a line then loop it, improvising over it until I find another that I like.

I will then record the second line and continue the process.

Sometimes I don’t loop if all I want is a single line.

I stop looping when it feels right.

I generally work from left to right, composing for all instruments as I go.

Sometimes I work on one measure.

Sometimes I work on a phrase or longer passage.

I just let my intuition guide me.

Do what feels right and accept what sounds good.

That’s all you have to do.

Thus far, everything I’ve said holds true of non-classical music.

What makes classical music different is that there tend to be a lot more melodies plus there are specific forms, like ternary form and sonata form.

The actual study of classical music, for me, comes down to studying these forms.

The rest you can pretty much do by ear, with just a little bit of theory.

I say this with confidence because, to this day, I still don’t know, off the top of my head, what the notes of a B-minor chord are and yet I’ve composed numerous pieces for string quartet.

It’s like poetry.

The overall sense of what your doing is more important than the actual letters.

The latter are just devices.

One thing I’ve found important in composing classical music is to have an ongoing sense of style with your piece.

The musicality of this can’t be put into words.

Take Bach’s Toccato and Fugue in D Minor, for instance.

The piece has the same ominous feeling and urgency throughout.

It musically sounds like the same scene or moment.

You need to keep this in mind when composing, however, it’s something that your ear also needs to develop.

As you write more and more music, you will begin to hear when passages you may improvise don’t fit the character of the piece and should be avoided.

Ones that do gel are to be recorded.

With sufficient experience, this level of discernment can carry over to multi-movement pieces.

Each movement will have the same characteristic as the others.

Honestly, it will take time to develop this level of hearing.

Thus far, I have spoken in generalities, but to be honest, composing music, for me, is simply that.

Looping and improvising and making judgements about what I hear.

For classical music, I just follow some additional guidelines.

The first is that I stick to scales.

I don’t mean all the scales, but if a piece is written in G minor, it only uses notes from G minor.

This differs from techno and big band which may use notes outside of the scale.

Doing this alone will already make your work sound half-classical.

The other half comes from the hundred melodies you need to develop and the overall form.

It is no exaggeration to say a hundred melodies.

If you think about how a techno song repeats a melody or phrase for 16 bars, a classical piece will literally change the melody every bar.

You thus have to be more melodically creative when writing classical.

Often it’s spoken about how a theme or melody is developed in classical music.

It’s simpler to just think about it as writing a bunch of melodies with a similar characteristic.

Your writing, your composing is the actual development.

Once I started composing, I was quite surprised to learn that you don’t need a killer melody to make a likeable piece.

Many of the actual phrases and motifs I use are very simple and plain but when layered together, create rich harmonies.

How do you do this?

Stick to the scale, loop, and improvise.

Let your ear be the judge of whether or not the resulting combination is something you want.

If you now work from left to right, you will have the tools to build suspense and drama into your piece.

You can clearly hear when the drama is rising, when it needs to reach the peak, when there should be a resolution.

You will just hear it.

You don’t even need to think about it.

Just improvise and stop when you’ve captured that moment.

Record and move on.

Personally, I compose very fast.

I can write one minute’s worth of music in one hour, regardless of genre.

I wrote my most Haydn-sounding piece for string quartet, Time Suite Mov. 1, in six hours.

I wrote my little symphony, Sky Suite Mov. 1, Sky Suite Mov. 2, Sky Suite Mov. 3, in three days, spread over two weeks.

This is the power of a DAW and improvisation.

Your second guideline is form.

I’m not going to list them all here.

What I want to emphasize is that form matters and it will make your compositions sound much more classical.

The simplest form with which to start is not binary form but ternary.

If you only learn one form, learn ternary.

Ternary is easy.

You write a long section, say one or two minutes.

You then write a contrasting section.

You then repeat the original section.

Thus, you may have an ominous first section, a happy middle section in the relative key, then the same ominous section again.

The contrast between sections is important as it is that which will give your piece character and not just sound like a variation on a theme.

I wish to end with orchestration.

I always thought the drama of a piece came from the orchestration, as it was being played by an orchestra, but it’s not.

The drama comes the inherent melodies and harmonies.

Initially, I used to compose piano-like melodies then orchestrate them.

However, I found it better to compose while listening to the actual instrument patches as the blending of the various instruments (e.g. bassoon + cello) is now an additional compositional element.

You can compose a symphony.

It just takes some time to get up to that level.

Start by composing single movement pieces for two instruments.

Then move up to three instruments.

Then four.

Then start working on multi-movement pieces using two, three or four instruments.

Then write single movement chamber music (music using eight or more instruments).

Then multi-movement chamber music.

At this point, you can write a symphony.

Study symphonic form and write four, related chamber music movements.

That’s the essence of it anyways.

I hope you enjoyed this monograph.

I hope you will become a composer, or better composer, and so bring more music into the world.

—Rory O’Connor, May 6, 2023

P.S. For a small tutorial, showing the actual compositional process I use, listen to my piece, A Small Tutorial.

The music was written exactly as it is heard, from left to right, being developed on the fly.