Composing and Arranging
What the exam tests
Composition and arranging questions test your ability to manipulate motives, harmonic progressions, texture, form, and instrumentation. You should be fluent in transposition, range and tessitura of common instruments, voice leading, and scoring conventions.
Concepts to master
- Motivic development: repetition, sequence, inversion, retrograde, augmentation, diminution, fragmentation.
- Harmonic function: tonic, predominant, dominant; secondary dominants; cadence types (authentic, plagal, half, deceptive).
- Voice leading rules: avoid parallel fifths and octaves; resolve leading tones upward; handle doubled thirds carefully.
- Transposition: B-flat instruments sound a major second lower than written; F instruments (horn) sound a perfect fifth lower; E-flat instruments sound a major sixth lower (alto sax) or minor third higher (E-flat clarinet).
- Arranging: doubling for color vs. weight; distributing melody across sections; balancing brass against woodwinds.
Traps
A frequent trap is confusing written vs. sounding pitch. Another is misidentifying a cadence: a deceptive cadence moves V to vi, not V to I. Also watch for items that call any repeated figure a sequence; a true sequence requires transposition of the whole pattern.
Worked example
A question asks how to transpose a concert-pitch melody for B-flat trumpet. Rule: write it a major second higher than concert pitch, then add the appropriate key signature. If the concert melody is in C major, the trumpet part is written in D major.
Rule of thumb
For transposition, always ask: "Does this instrument sound higher or lower than written, and by what interval?" Then apply the interval to both pitch and key signature.