Composing a March.

[Deleted]

For ages, I've really wanted to compose a march. 

If anything, it is the reason I got into composing classical music. Yet, try as I might, I have never been able to complete one. 

Knowledge isn't getting in the way as I know the instrumentation of marches and their forms etc.
Also, I've been able to arrange pieces of music for marching bands just fine. My only issue is that I find it hard to write a melody that sounds like a march. I can try again and again but nothing I compose sounds right. I have all these ideas in my head yet am unable to put them onto to paper so they make sense.

If anybody could help it would be much appreciated.

[Joseph]

A scull tap?    I doubt that anyone can do justice to your request.  Why not just go for a brisk walk at the park, maybe back and forth across the football field a few times, humming while you go?  Joseph

btw, I can empathize, I have spent a lifetime trying to compose a good Christmas song!  Lots of swings, plenty of misses, one or two bunts (sorry for the baseball allusions)

[Deleted]

I'll look at some scores and look at what their melodies do.

[Deleted]

Are you writing the melody first? A lot of marches don't have particularly march-like tunes. What makes a march is the tempo, the rhythm, the spring in the step, the instrumentation; often the tune itself could equally well have been used in quite different pieces.

My suggestion would be to leave the melody till last, rather than focussing on it from the beginning. Think tempo first. Do you want a quick march to liven up the people in the park when it's played in the bandstand on a sticky sleepy day? Slow and solemn for a funeral? Average sort of tempo for marching off to war?

What about time signature? Do you want 4/4 like Land of Hope & Glory? 6/8 like Brian Boru's March?

Major key? Minor key?

Then write just a few bars, no melody at this stage, just rhythm, and some basic harmonies, so you'll know what kind of a cadence you'll have at the end of the first line.

THEN start thinking about a melody. By then you'll have relatively little choice about the melody, because so much of the underlying structure will already be in place. You won't be thinking about a melody that will make a good march, you'll be concentrating on getting a tune that fits. You won't be working from a tabula rasa, that terrifying blank page or blank screen where anything is possible, and consequently nothing actually occurs to you.

It works for me that way, anyway. Whether it would work for you, who knows? But it's probably worth a try. If you do, let us know how you get on.

... Tony J ...

[Deleted]

"A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one."
-Dmitri Shostakovich

Now that is a sentiment with which I am in absolute agreement!

Richard

[Deleted]

Cheers Tony J, that makes sense. I'll give it a go.

[Ed Sharpe]

How goes the progress on the march?