Handbook

In this course you will learn some key methods of musical transformation. We will begin with orchestration, which transforms music for a single instrument into music that involves a stage full of performers. Orchestration also requires careful decisions about adding new materials, removing old material, adapting, multiplying, and spatialising musical ideas, all of which will be discussed in terms of historical models (including Mozart, Brahms, Wagner, and Adès, for example). The second part of the course revolves around a question: how have composers used old music to make new music? In answering this question we will focus on transformation itself, and we will examine in detail a wide range of recent re-compositions of earlier music (including Halvorsen, Ives, Berio, Schnittke, Nyman and Adams, for example). These will form models either for your own re-compositions, or for an essay about recomposition.