Compositional technique
Procedures of musical shaping.
What it means
Compositional technique designates the craft procedures with which musical material is developed and joined into a texture. It is the learnable part of composing: not what is invented but how what is invented is handled.
Musical use
The stock of such procedures is manageable and astonishingly constant over the centuries. A motif can be repeated, repeated on another degree (sequence), mirrored in its intervals (inversion), read backward (retrograde), brought into augmented or diminished values, divided, or combined with another. Voices can imitate one another, run against one another, exchange positions. Harmonically, sonorities can be altered, secondary dominants inserted, keys changed.
The teaching subjects order this stock: counterpoint, classically built up in five species, practises the leading of independent voices; harmony the connection of the sonorities; the theory of form the construction of larger contexts. Historically these subjects were not a theory alongside practice but its basis — whoever was trained in figured bass could design a piece at the instrument.
Bear in mind that technique is no end in itself. An artful construction that does not sound misses its purpose; conversely, what seems effortless almost always rests on careful work.
Among the classical techniques belong counterpoint, imitation, motivic-thematic work, variation, and sequence. In the twentieth century, twelve-tone technique, serial procedures, aleatorics, sound-mass technique, and minimal music were added. In popular music too there are fixed procedures, for instance riff formation, loop, and arrangement following studio techniques. A technique alone does not yet make a work; it is the tool with which musical ideas are ordered, developed, and held together over longer stretches.
Performance practice
When working up a piece, look for these procedures: is this passage a sequence? An inversion of the theme? An imitation? Recognizing it changes the shaping directly — a sequence wants to be led as an intensification, an imitation wants the entry to become audible. And write small exercises yourself: whoever has once built a two-part texture reads polyphony differently afterward.