 Welcome to another Art of Composing Daily Vlog. I'm John Grantingham and today we're going to be talking about the basic idea. So this is a continuation on our series on music and time or form. And I thought I would dive in straight into what a basic idea is because it's critical for your understanding of form and it's a very useful tool for any composer. So I'm going to go ahead and read the textbook definition again just so I don't miss anything in particular. A basic idea is an initiating function consisting of a two measure idea that usually contains several melodic or rhythmic motives constituting the primary material of a theme. So if I'm going to unpack that basically we have a two measure musical idea and the idea is usually very complete feeling on its own. Now it's an initiating function meaning that it's got a beginning feel and you find basic ideas at the beginning of themes. So a sentence which is a longer which is a theme type which we'll talk about in another video or a period or one of the hybrid themes or small ternary form they all start off with a two measure basic idea. Now the basic idea tends to have two usually about two characteristic motives and a characteristic motive is contrasted with a conventional motive or a conventional idea and conventional stuff is the stuff that you hear all the time. It's the easy go-to types of things. It's arpeggio or scales. Right? That's conventional. You'll see conventional stuff used in certain circumstances within pieces. Often they're in subordinate themes. You'll see a lot of convention material where you're expanding out ideas, expanding out cadences and stuff. You've got to fill up a lot of space so you might as well throw in a whole scale there or something. Conventional on the or sorry a characteristic on the other hand usually has something that's memorable. It's memorable rhythms, memorable intervals or just something unique to it. So it could be right or whatever you want to do. Just something that sticks out in your ear beyond just the simple basic stuff that we all practice on our instruments. Now we focus at least on the beginning and for the most part on tonic prolongation for our basic ideas and what that means is that we're going to start on tonic. Right? We can go to other chords but then we go back to tonic by the end of the basic idea and there's a reason for that. It makes it kind of like a complete cell within itself. You can kind of pick it up, move it, you can transpose it. You know it's always going to work. The other, the last thing is that we tend to have sort of opening up gestures at the beginning of basic ideas and closing down gestures at the end of the basic idea. And with the tonic prolongation and the two motives all those together is what makes it feel like a complete idea. So if I'm going to sit here, I'm going to sit here and actually improvise a basic idea and see what we come up with. I'm just going to do this in C major because C major is the easiest key but if I start off right... So as a basic idea it meets all the criteria. I only had really one characteristic mode of the... And then I had a very conventional sounding thing. My harmony was real simple. All I did was raise that third up to the fourth, give it kind of a suspended sound. I could have gone to a four chord and played something else but that just happened to be what I played. And then you'll notice that the end... Now I don't cadence. I'm not cadencing there. I'm just staying on one and I'm moving downward. Now as a rule you don't have to necessarily follow the opening up closing down. I mean if you want to write a basic idea like this... That's fine. You can have something that just goes up all the way to wherever, however long you want to do it. It's really just more like a generality to say that you want to be thinking about these things. If you're bringing in something new open it up. Make it feel like you're going somewhere. If you want things to calm and close down a little bit then have a downwards shaped motive or downward shaped idea at the end. Now what's cool about the basic idea and why it's so powerful is because it can be picked up and repeated very easily. It can be fragmented really easily for continuations or for transitions, things like that. So it's a really useful thing to do and two measures is very approachable. There should be nobody here that's afraid of writing two measures of music and if you've never composed anything before I think this is a great way to start. You really don't need to know much. I mean you can literally just write C, a C chord here like that and then I'm just going to write some notes. G, C, B, A, G, F, E, G, E, D, C. I didn't even put rhythms to them but it's just... And now I can just copy that but maybe I'm going to on the next on the repetition I'm going to change the harmony. So you can see I took that initial motive, I repeated it in special ways and then when I got to the end and what I did there was basically a sentence which is a basic idea, a repetition, a basic idea and then something called a continuation which is a fragmented basic idea stretch out to four bars. These are extremely useful tools for every composer to know and I think you should spend some time write some two measure basic ideas and let me know what you think make sure you subscribe go to my channel hit the subscribe button and then once you do make sure you hit the little bell icon because that'll give you notifications I've been doing a lot more symposiums basically I've been getting on and doing Q&A for whoever wants it 10-15 minutes here and there I think that's that's been a little bit better than trying to schedule these hour and a half two hour symposiums every every week which is I think just it's a long time for people to watch. So that's basically it I thought I would end off with a little performance by me a little piece that I worked on a long time ago that is easy and fun to play