Connecting Sections in Your Musical Arrangements

Today we are going to look at a couple of ways of connecting sections of your musical arrangement. You can do it through the use of transition elements from one section to the other, and by means of reusing certain musical gestures or motifs that appear throughout the arrangement. This will help you to create unity in your music piece by means of familiarity. Let’s hear the examples:

The First Reference Idea

Basically, I used a couple of ideas throughout the music that show up in the very beginning, in order to achieve that sense of unity. One was this part played by the celli in pizzicato:

I used it in the B section as well, but I shifted it to the violas and changed the playing style.

Also, it provided the rhythmic skeleton for the percussion parts in the Bridge section.

The Second Reference Idea

The other element that I reused was this rhythmic pattern made by the sticks:

And sure enough, it appears in the B section again, now being played in the toms

Incidentally, this rhythmic pattern played on the sticks, that originally appears in the A section, shows up again right before the end of part B as if it was foreshadowing the return of the A section.

Connecting Sections With Transitions

As far as transitions go, the Bridge section is prepared by this scale run from the violins in the upper register:

As a rule of thumb, as far as transitions go, you need to come up with something that stands out from what is already going on as a way of signaling that something is going to happen.

In this case it was this high pitched scale run, but you could do other melodic gestures in different registers as well. Or a general rhythmic accent, which was what I ended up using at the end of Bridge as a transition to the B section:

The way I found to transition from section B and back to A, was to make it less busy in terms of rhythmic movement while reintroducing that rhythmic pattern in the sticks that I showed you before. Again, foreshadowing with an element that already existed in the section I want to transition to, helps:

Piecing It Together

And now lets hear the whole thing put together. This piece of music consists of an A and a B section with a little Bridge in between them. And with no further ado, here is the complete piece of music:

Now you know how I kept a sense of unity and familiarity throughout this piece of music. I did it by carrying over something from one section to the other or by revisiting ideas and adapting them to the new contexts present in the different sections. And also by paying attention and adjusting the transition materials that usually precede the next section by one or two bars. But this can vary, of course.

As always, there are other ways to connect sections but give these ideas a go and try them out in your music!

Happy Composing 🙂