Exercises to Practice Your Music Composition Skills

     Having to cope with all the new things you are learning may be challenging at times and this is why I am creating this post. In it, you will find lots of practical suggestions for short music composition studies because doing music composition exercises is a way of making sure that you are working on a particular skill while you are following a structured plan for learning and discovering your musical identity. The more you work on your skills, the better you will understand and internalize the concepts you are working with and ultimately make them yours!

     In sum, my main goal is to plan your learning. As you progress, you will find where your weaknesses and strengths are and hopefully, what you will have to do to continue improving as a composer. The exercises are divided by sections so you can know what the main focus is.

     Also, you will find links in the exercises and these will take you to the relevant posts in case you need to check in with the music theory before your start working on them.

Happy Composing!

INTERVALS

• Write a musical phrase for two instruments containing several perfect fourths (or other consonant interval you wish to experiment with) and then create a contrast with several dissonant fourths (or other dissonant interval).

• Write a musical passage with a crescendo and diminuendo of the interval tension

• Write a melodic phrase and double it with equidistant intervals (all thirds, fourths, fifths, etc).

• Write a musical phrase with simple intervals (closely spaced intervals) and contrast it with compound intervals (widely spaced intervals)

SCALES

• Write a piece of music using original or synthetic scales

• Create an original two-octave scale and compose a melody with this material

• Write for a trio using only pentatonic material

• Write a musical phrase based on the Dorian #4 mode from the harmonic minor

• Write melodies for a duet using melodic minor scale material and contrast it by alternating it with the closely related whole-tone or diminished scales

• Write a melodic phrase in the Mixolydian mode

• Write a melody in the Phrygian mode while using with some chromatic alterations

• Write a musical passage using brighter modes and, in a different section, contrast it with darker modes

CHORDS

• Compose a melody and use triads to harmonize it

• Use the same melody but harmonize it with tetrads 

• Write a melody based on pentatonic scale material and use chords by fourths

• Experiment with quartal harmony using multiple note chords and play around with chord inversions – use a pentatonic based melody

• Write a melody in a natural diatonic scale and harmonize it with 9^th chords

• Use the same melody and experiment with other chord extensions

• Use the previous melody and chords and experiment with chord inversions and different notes on bass when going from chord to chord

• Write a musical passage harmonized exclusively with chords by perfect fourths – experiment with augmented-perfect and perfect-augmented chords

• Write a musical phrase using the melodic minor and harmonize it with chords from that scale – experiment with other scales, like the harmonic, diminished, etc.

• Create a melody using a synthetic scale of your creation and harmonize it with chords derived from that scale

• Write a pentatonic musical passage harmonized exclusively with chords by perfect fourths – experiment with augmented-perfect and perfect-augmented chords as well

• Use a two-octave scale, compose a melody and use the harmonic potential of each octave to harmonize the melody with polychords

• Build a chord, in fourths, seconds, clusters, polychords or extended triads, etc; and perceive the respective consonant and dissonant implications that arise from the way you distribute the chord pitches or structures – play it in different registers

• Write a musical passage that is harmonized by clusters formed from diatonic material – experiment with pentatonic or chromatic material as well

• Write a chord progression that alternates clusters with chords by fourths – experiment with chords by thirds

HARMONY

• Harmonize a melody using a pandiatonic harmonization approach

• Compose an 8-bar chord progression that ends with a perfect cadence

• Add secondary dominants and use dominant chord substitutions to the chord progression from the previous exercise

• Replace previous chords, or only the cadence, with their negative harmonic counterparts

• Create an 8-bar chord progression based on an interval cycle (fifths, thirds, etc) that works within the same tonality and contrast it with another 8-bar chord succession based on real parallel harmonic movement.

• Write a simple melody that will be doubled with block chords

• Use the previous melody and use it as guideline to create a polyharmonic passage

• Write an 8-bar chromatic chord progression, with melody, using any of the discussed techniques

• Use a pedal point in the first four bars of the previous chord progression and end the cadence with a suspension, retardation or anticipation

KEY CENTERS

• Compose a musical passage that explores the melodic and harmonic possibilities of polymodal chromaticism

• Write a 16-bar chord progression using chromatic writing and has several brief modulations that follow the multi-tonic system

• Write a bitonal musical passage in Ab and C major tonalities

• With previously produced material for the tonality of Ab, use it as the home base tonality that contrasts with the material produced for C major that is directly transposed to either close or distant tonalities

• Again, using the material from the previous exercise, prepare the modulations to and from the respective keys using the discussed methods

• Write a musical passage with a modal chord succession that creates contrasts between different modal centers from the same tonality – going from dark to brighter modal color

• Use the same musical passage, modulating to the same modal centers but in different tonalities – going from dark to brighter tonalities

RHYTHM

• Write a musical passage than uses irregular meter

• Compose a melody that uses a rhythmic palindrome

• Use a polyrhythmic approach to compose the accompaniment for left and right hand of a piano piece of a modal chord succession

• Write a musical passage that uses polymeter. When the meters meet, use an implied metric modulation to create a contrast between the two sections

• Extend the previous material by using the same material of the first section but instead of using polymeter, adapt it to a simple meter but with different natural accents

• Write a ostinato using only sixteenth notes and experiment with different beat accents (accent every three or five sixteenth notes)