Welcome to the first blog post

Welcome to my blog! Are blogs still a thing in 2025? Does anyone still read them? Either way, I intend to write weekly posts about curiosities I notice in music, lessons I learn in composition, software tips and tutorials, etc… I hope you will find something of value in it.

The Composer’s Toolbag

Music composition, and especially orchestration, are traditional crafts in which one learns reliable ways to make the music achieve its intended effect. The artist can inject beauty and emotion from their heart into the heart of the piece, but without well-developed craft, their ideas mostly remain unrealized and unfulfilled. Besides learning the fundamentals of compositional craft: motivic construction, thematic development, form, harmony, etc., we also collect little nuggets of ideas along the way, which we can then selectively deploy to reliably contribute some desired effect in our music.

Brahms’ 4th Symphony

Today I wanted to discuss one of these little “nuggets” that I got from the opening movement of Brahms’ 4th Symphony. I love this symphony. Something about its melodies and textures just grabbed me the first time I heard it and to this day I still find it addictive. I love how the dramatic first theme enters immediately, wasting no time setting up an introduction of any kind, sort of akin to the opening of Mozart’s Symphony no. 40.

The Major Triad + Diminished 6th

In the first movement of the symphony, between the first theme (mm. 1-52) and the second theme (mm. 57-107) we get a sort of transitory motif in the woodwinds and horns:

The harmony here is essentially F# major, the dominant of the preceding section’s B minor. However, the non-chord tone of D in this motif imparts a sort of “cinematic” flavor. I think it is because D is the tonic of the relative major key (D major), and using it over the dominant of the minor essentially makes the harmony a superimposed major and augmented triad.

This is just the introduction of this idea to the movement though, and later in the development section we get this evolution of it:

Here, the major/augmented harmony is in the strings, rising from the low register to high and back down again. You can see the shape of the phrase in the written music, the ascension passing from the celli and 2nd violins to the violas and 1st violins, then the descent passing from the celli and 1st violins to the violas and 2nd violins. All the while, a tense drone is sustained over the basses, timpani, and horns.

I love the dramatic, eerie effect of this phrase. Look at the way Kleiber conducts it in the video from earlier in the article (timestamp: 5:31), his face and gently undulating hands say it all.

Brahms brings the motif back once more at the start of the recap in the strings, this time as eighth notes instead of the quarter note triplets from before, while the main theme is augmented and fragmented in the woodwinds and horns.

I recently scored a trailer for the Spitfire Audio Albion Colossus competition and took some inspiration from this same motif. At the end of the trailer, the camera flies forward over an apocalyptic scene of a burning street (complete with fire-breathing giant monster), picking up speed until we fly right into the face of the beast and end with a big hit on the title. I had composed the cue in G minor and so I thought in order to build tension up to the end, I would use a D major (dominant V) over this final shot. But the harmony alone isn’t sufficient- to add motion and build energy, I thought back to this Brahms motif, and decided to write a similar sort of building motion in the strings, peppering in the diminished 6th for the eerie and cinematic flavor I thought this sort of scene demanded. Check it out below: