Introducing students to the idea of form and structure in electronic music is a daunting task. There are no set formulas like there are in classical and jazz, but a formula is not the worst place to start. The way many musical genres have developed requires you to think about technologies and their impact on the way music is created – and, therefore, how it is structured. Here, I share thoughts on general principles.
Teach simple pop forms
To give your students a solid grounding, you need to teach the most common pop song structures first. Students then understand the codifications that pop music has and how these can be played with. This also allows you to develop MIDI programming and audio sequencing skills with your students.
Such song structures include the:
- 32-bar popular song, as in ‘I Got Rhythm’ by George Gershwin. This form plus the Blues gave birth to jazz and popular music composition as we know it. Its formulaic structure is easy to understand and it transposes onto multiple genres. I like to use the song ‘Every Breath You take’ by The Police as a modern example of this form.
- Verse-chorus, as in ‘Don't Look Back in Anger’ by Noel Gallagher. This demonstrates perfectly how a simple verse-chorus can take many twists and turns. There are clever harmonic and structural tricks, and it has the bonus that students don't mind belting this one out.
- Strophic, as in ‘Hallelujah’ by Leonard Cohen. This song is as good as it gets for demonstrating how this form found in hymns is still relevant today.
Abstract/avant-garde becomes popular
Showing how making music with electronics gave birth to new forms and styles from the early 20th century onwards is the next logical step. Students see that playing with emerging technologies generates creative ideas and that the most abstract music can find its way into the mainstream, allowing students to put modern day sampling technologies into context.
There is only one place to start: the Futurists, who have their roots in the early 20th century and were led initially by Filippo Marinetti. This collective of artists started to create new instruments, including early proto synthesisers, that mimicked the industrial world that was growing around them.
It wasn't until the development of tape-based recording technologies in the mid-20th century that the whole concept of sampling, as we know it, was born. Enter Pierre Schaeffer, the French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, and founder of Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète. His music is a tough listen, which is unsurprising given the technical limitations of the time, but he pioneered the very idea of using looping, pitch-mapping and one-shot sampling to create musical ideas. Essentially, his approach leads to the sound collage on a spoken ‘Number 9’ found on the Beatles' White Album, and beyond.
Listen to Schaeffer's Etude aux chemins de fer and you will hear how a rhythmic ostinato is created out of a loop from some kind of mechanism; how melody can be created from the sample of a whistle; and that the very idea of musical structure can be created out of these sounds.
These ideas lead us to the work of Steve Reich. It is not hyperbole to say that Reich changed the game! There are several different periods of composition in his early career to explore: from his tape ‘phase’ pieces to Pendulum Music, to his purely acoustic compositions such as Music for 18 Musicians, all showing music as a process. He develops an idea based on repetitive loops that slowly evolve to maintain interest – a technique widely deployed in techno and ambient genres.
Listen to Reich's It's Gonna Rain and Different Trains. The first demonstrates how the same loop, if slightly out of phase with itself, can create constantly changing rhythms; the second piece shows how samples can generate musical material for live instruments to copy and develop.
Connection with commercial dance music
The repetitive but slow-changing ideas in these avant-garde compositions transpose directly to house, techno and other styles of early Club music. When coupled with the use of sampling technology, they represent a natural reaction to an increasingly industrialised world. It is difficult to tell how much the pioneers of this later music were influenced by the avant-garde, but they certainly share an aesthetic and approach.
With this, Club music also developed a set of codifications that have migrated to the most commercial genres. Avicii and Skrillex have dominated the charts, but they have a lot to thank Carl Craig and Derrick Carter for, with things like kick-drum builds; drops (the heavy bit when all the beats come in); instrumental sections as choruses (think Levels by Avicii); breakdowns (thinning all parts to create a new section, allowing more intense parts of the track space to breathe); noise sweeps/uplifters (using noise waves and filters to create a sense of either upward trajectory towards a drop or breakdown); downlifters (the EDM equivalent of a crash cymbal, an uplifter in reverse); and so on.
All of these come from Club dance music and have been co-opted into the commercial scene. You cannot teach students how to make commercial dance music without showing them where it comes from.
This now becomes useful to subjects wider than Music Technology A Level's Component 2. It starts to be helpful in a variety of BTEC areas and even GCSE or A Level music composition.
Case studies
Here is my recommended listening for pieces demonstrating modern compositional ideas:
- Aphex Twin: Windowlicker, a good example for studying form. The track has a clear ternary structure, and can even be boiled down to a lead-sheet form that could be used with a jazz quartet. There are plenty of production ideas that were well ahead of their time, and the use of technology as a compositional tool is evident.
- Squarepusher: My Red Hot Car, a good example for studying stutter editing. There is a massive jungle flavour to this classic; it uses stutter edits to play with the idea of flow and uses them to create fills and breaks that stop the loop-based composition becoming monotonous.
- Massive Attack: Angel, an exercise in sonic development. Massive Attack are masters of the slow-developing soundscape, and this is their best example. It shows how the addition of musical and sonic ideas over a bass line can build musical sections.
- Floating Points: Last Bloom, for varying ostinato. The track shows how subtle manipulations of an ostinato/riff over time keep up interest in loop-based music.
- Flying Lotus: Spontaneous, an exercise in effected vocal techniques. This has a huge number of ideas for vocal processing – everything from editing to FX is used to develop the piece and keep the vocal feeling fresh throughout.
- Daft Punk: Crescendolls, an exercise in creating ‘hooks’ out of samples. A small vocal sample is taken from Barry Manilow's ‘Who's been sleeping in my bed’ to create the main riff. This shows how even a small hook from an older record can create a whole new one.
Applied knowledge
Finally, here are some technology-based ideas for thinking about structure and developing your material:
- Create a musical line out of a small loop from the vocal part (show the transition or process similar to how Steve Reich would).
- Put in a large drum break-section, with impactful drums.
- Use a strong transient sound from the vocal part to create an EDM-style riff.
- Have one section where the vocal is cut up into eight different samples, and then another section where the vocal part is played in full using a vocoder.
- Create a bass sound out of the kick-drum by pitch-mapping it.
- Using looping, create a drone out of one of the sustained vocal notes on a sampler.
- Make a hi-hat out of some sibilance in the vocal.
- Use the noise oscillator on a synth to create a ‘sweep’ sound.
- ‘Stutter’ your drums or your vocal part in one of your sections.
- Use automation to make sure your synth sounds are developing through your pieces.
- Use rhythmic phase techniques, following Steve Reich's example.
These techniques are typical of the previous case studies, but they're also available to us when working in average-to-good school setups or studios. We have the means.
