Last time I left you with the challenge of composing a theme on a given two-measure basic idea. If you struggled with this exercise -- and I hope you did -- you'll have noticed that the idea lends itself best to sentence form. In fact, an immediate repetition of the basic idea comes across so naturally that to do otherwise sounds unnatural. And so I rest my case from last week: only by getting your hands dirty can you fully appreciate the difficulty of composition...

ANDREW SCHARTMANN'S MUSICAL TIDBITS

COMPOSITION