Songwriting Sunday: Let the Universe Choose!

I recently saw a request for s specific type of song for a specific goal, and I did not respond to the request because my response would have been rather snarky.

I wonder why people do not make up their own songs in these types of situations. I really do. Why do you need to ask for songs when you could write your own? Were these music therapists not taught to write music as students? Are they laboring under some imposter syndrome symptoms that tell them that they cannot write their own songs? Is it easier to ask for others to give them something than it is to spend some time making their own thing?

After I abstained from responding in a vein similar to the paragraph above, I started wondering if I just do this because I haven't always had the ability to ask others for their work. 

Gather 'round, children, as I tell you a tale from the 20th Century... 

In the days afore email, social media, and home computers, we music therapists had to create our own songs, take them to conferences, and share them with the people that would arrive in our presentations. We had to self-publish music therapy books and figure out how to share resources. We attended experience sharing workshops where everyone would write down (yep, many of us handwrote our ideas on staff paper and notebook paper) an idea, copy it on the copy machine at our local print store, and then hand it to the participants. We would then gather all the sheets of paper and store them in three-ring binders where the work of others would be looked at over and over again. These meetings would happen occasionally, so ideas were not shared at the touch of an enter button.

As this vintage music therapist can attest to, these days, it takes much less work to find and learn things from others. I think that is a good thing - I really do, but I also have the ingrained bias of "write your own."

Now, you might be one of the people who doesn't feel comfortable writing music. Perhaps your songs were criticized by teachers, professors, clinical supervisors. Maybe you don't feel like songs written for simple concepts are really songs? Let me tell you, there is nothing wrong with writing music any way that you need to write music.

If you are scared of writing songs, then let's talk about it. I have lots of techniques that I have learned over the years that help me compose songs that I use in my music therapy practice.

Let's start with a simple way to compose - dice rolling.

Before you do any sort of composition though, it is a good idea to review some basic music theory concepts (but don't worry, we can make anything work - we learn the rules so we can break the rules!!). If you don't remember what chords work with specific scale degrees, then review that or have it near you as we go into the next part...

For this composition, you can either use a dice or pull notes from cup. I don't have dice sitting around, so I often use small pieces of paper with each note written on them. Decide on what key you want to use for the song (or just pull a card or roll the die). To make the die work, you have to decide what each number means, so if you decide to use scale degrees (1=tonic tone, moveable do) you will have to know what scale degree matches each number. If you prefer, you can have a set system (1=always is C). There is no wrong way to do this.

Start by rolling the die and writing down what number comes up. Do this until you feel you have enough notes to get the song finished. Songs do not have to be complex to be effective as music. Organize the notes into music through playing them with different tempi, chord progressions, rhythms, meters, and words until the song becomes something that is solid for you. There is nothing that will be "wrong" in this process, but you might end up with something significantly different than you thought would happen to start off with. That's okay. Nothing that you create is without worth. Got it??

Would anyone come to a series of songwriting workshops if I held them on Zoom?Maybe I will start one...