The composition workshop is designed to give students an introduction to the processes of musical composition through a series of exercises involving analysis, improvisation and simple composition.

We are planning a series of projects, each beginning with a single piece of music. Through a series of meetings for each piece we will move from analysis of the piece, to group improvisations based on ideas gleaned during the analysis, to structured and rehearsed improvisations, to composition and a final 'concert' of the student's pieces. All music is to be written for the performance resources available in the class.

There will be a final project which will consist of a short composition written for performers in the class, and performed during reading period at a concert in Taplin Auditorium (date to be announced).

There is valuable technology available these days for composition. While not required, students are encourage to learn to use a musical notation program. There are several options here. For students owning a Windows PC the least expensive is NoteWorthy Composer ($39). (This only runs on PCs). More expensive alternatives are Finale and Sibelius, (which run on both Macs and PCs) but for most purposes at the beginning level NoteWorthy Composer should suffice. We also have a site license for Nightingale which only runs on Macintosh computers, and is free to all Princeton students. You should also install Quicktime, which comes with a rudimentary synthesizer that will allow you to listen to your compositions. This is available at the Apple site. (The free Quicktime is fully adequate for your needs, don't let them persuade you otherwise.) We can help you learn most of these programs, but they all come with good manuals and you should be able to figure them out on your own.

Students may also be interested in Free Pro Tools. This is a sound editing and mixing program that is the industry standard. It is available for both Mac and PC, and we will teach you how to use it.

It is useful to also have a soundfile converter and toolkit handy. You may end up with an aiff file and need to convert it to an sd2 file, for example. For PCs I recommend SOX. You probably need the Win32 binary. For Macs I recommend Soundhack.

If any students are interested in more advanced software synthesis, we recommendSuperCollider, but only this for those who have some programming experience in C, C++ or object-oriented programming languages.

It will be perfectly possible to do well in this course without using any of these technological tools -- just using pencil, paper and ears, but we feel that they have become a powerful and significant aspect of composition today and that they are worth the investment of time and effort.

There three iMac computers in the listening room of the library, and two more in room 212, which are equippend with Pro Tools, Finale and Nightingale amd available for your use.

All improvisations and class concerts will be recorded directly to CD and made availble for your use and study.