"Composition Exercises" is a series of texts by Tobias Reber (composer, instrumentalist, facilitator).
You may view them all at http://www.ahundredquirkylegs.com/tag/composition-exercise/ with the first one appearing in 2016.
They might be useful, interesting, conceptual, funny and also performable.
Occasionally on a webpage you can also encounter a recording that was sent to Tobias, however, it's not exactly a prompting initiative because the performance of the pieces is not the focus.
Cempekitien Oxorciko #25
Choose a random text – a news article, a poem, anything.
Replace every “s” with a “k” and vice versa.
Then swap every “e” with an “o” and vice versa.
Read it to the next person without any explanation, and with a straight face.
Composition Exercise #113
Play any Schönberg piece, but only play the notes belonging to C major.
Of more than 500 scores, jokes and other ideas, close to the heart are especially the calls to engage with escape rooms (323), scavenger hunts (66, 384) and board games (452).
Play more
Individual cues are used, with the kind agreement from the author, in the random score feature:
- 4. Invent (better yet: dream) a new word. Explain its meaning, etymology and a famous invented quote in which ...
- 12. Let a piece of gear guide the development of a piece of music
- 13. Bridge in 5/4
- 15. Treat shuffle ratio as a dynamic parameter
- 18. the way a child sings – joyfully inaccurate, taking erratic turns, and like no one is listening
- 39. Channel the sadness.
- 45. Create tension and release through careful manipulation of just one parameter
- 50. Don’t use the Fibonacci sequence in your piece
- 53. Read the shape and surface of an instrument – yours ...
- 67. Treat density – in sound and in time – as a dynamic parameter in every voice in your composition, and in the ...
- 178. Invert the dynamics
- 265. Replace all notes with rests and all rests with notes
- 329. Different sounds for different note values
- 391. Do something the way it’s always been done
- 439. Expression through abstraction
- 493. Let the talking do the music
- 505. Sing the truth in Falsetto
- 508. Loudatio. Howlelujah. Sighlence.
- 542. Schrödinger Scat
19 cues from this source
Random scores with cues from this source:
A Single Random Cue ♢ GOTO Score ♢ Bubbles ♢ Horizontal Vanilla
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