"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).
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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