Let’s take for example the nocturnes of Chopin.
My preferred one is nocturne n. 20
He certainly didn’t have studio machine to record their sound AFAIK
How then did he memorize and write down everything to remember later?
Did he start playing the piano, write down the notes, continue playing or did he memorize the whole song by heart without any writing process?
Sorry 4 my bad English btw. Not a English native speaker.
EDIT : thanks everyone for the explanation.
In: 157
Musical scoring as we know it goes waaaaay back. So yes, one could tinker around with notes as they like, and write things down as they go.
They wrote the music down as they came up with it. Composers were all different, but many wrote down themes or melodies they wanted to expand on. Then there are certain ways you can transform themes and move them around and “develop” them as it’s known. Then you might come in after the melody is written and decide how you’d like to harmonize it.
Yes, they would tinker on whatever instrument was handy and write down the notes as they sounded right.
Usually writing the notes would come first. If someone writes music long enough (especially the greats of classical music), they would be able to start to hear it in their heads just seeing it on the staff. They could then play it to test it out, and if it didn’t sound right they could make the tweaks then.
I think most people can imagine sounds, including music. I can imagine them very vividly, although for music I struggle to imagine more than 1 or maybe 2 notes at once.
We have systems for writing down music with pen and paper.
Therefore, you can imagine a series of sounds (like a melody, or a chord progression, etc etc), and then write it down if you want to use it in a song. If you do this work for long enough, then you can write a song of any length you feel like.
You can review what you’re written, either just in your imaginination, or getting an instrument and playing it to see how it sounds. (I lack the skills to easily imagine music from just reading written notation, but I imagine with practice a composer could do so quite well, but would probably also use an instrument to help.)
Review and revise as necesarry, and hopefully that will improve the quality of the song until you are happy with it and consider it finished.
Others have answered your question about writing music, but I just want to add that you don’t really “memorize” what you write, not like someone else would. If you created it, you already know it through and through and up and down. It’s already been playing in your head for a while.
Check out this early medieval hymnals/ easy crude sheet music https://www.medievalists.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/307119740_655118215959163_5597536272382496787_n.jpg
The notes are just a Scale https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_(music) and mode https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(music)
Are the same in every language and country and also why we sorta know what ancient Roman/Greek music sounded like
Writing music is like writing a story, except you kinda play notes and hum to yourself while you’re writing to see if it sounds right…
Before audio recording existed, the only place ine could hear a symphony outside of a music hall was inside their own head. Being a composer meant studying to learn how to transscribe what the imagination conjures, so that a group of musicians could musically manifest that which, uo to that point, existed only as an idea.
Some composers have a complete idea in their head and can simply score it out without an instrument. It was said that Mozart had that level of recall. Others have to have an instrument handy and make many many corrections as the go — Beethoven was famous for this even as he was going deaf.
Most composers work within a style or an idiom — an approach to melody, harmony, rhythm, and tempo that they would follow through a piece. For example, Bach and his contemporaries wrote fugues — there were very specific approaches to fugue called the form of the piece (number of measures of a particular theme, repetition of theme, variation of theme, and length of each). Most of the great music that was written up until the Romantic period in the mind 19th century was based on other music in a specific form. When a contemporary musician plays a 16 bar blues, they are not inventing a new style or form, they are just working within an idiom that is well understood. Even in the Romantic Period composers like Chopin and Dvorak celebrated dance forms from their home countries — mazurkas, polonaises, polkas, souzedskas and so forth. They were usually not writing from scratch, but starting with a template and creating new ideas to fill in. This whole process makes scoring music a lot easier — the composer, copyist, musician do not have to carefully watch each note, they can use their training and experience to anticipate when things repeat, how often to play a part, when to play close attention and when to relax.
That said, modern orchestral composers often use technology as an aid and break a lot of forms and invent new styles all the time.
HTH
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