Music can be composed with chance, words, brainwaves or no notation at all
Composing music does not have to mean writing notes on staves. Some pieces exist only as instructions in words or graphics, some leave outcomes to chance, some pop songs are never written down, and musicians have even generated music from brainwaves captured by EEG headsets.
The word covers three things: an original work, the structure of that work, and the act of making it. Songwriters mainly produce songs, lyricists supply the words, and in classical music the composer usually handles orchestration, deciding which instruments carry the melody, countermelody, bassline and accompaniment. Writers for musical theatre and pop often hand that job to an arranger. In jazz and pop, landmark recordings carry the authority that printed scores hold in the classical world.
Twentieth-century experiments stretched the idea. Avant-garde composers used graphic notation, Karlheinz Stockhausen's Aus den sieben Tagen consists of text compositions, and John Cage, Morton Feldman and Witold Lutosławski embraced aleatoric music built on chance, a principle wind chimes demonstrate in any breeze. Musique concrète goes further, using typewriters, sirens and other sounds not normally thought of as musical. Brainwave composition has featured in Project Mindtunes, which paired disabled musicians with DJ Fresh.
A far narrower view came from Jean-Benjamin de Laborde in 1780, who held that composition amounted to just two things: arranging successive sounds pleasingly, which the ancients called melody, and combining simultaneous ones agreeably, which is harmony. Yet even precise notation, as in Western classical music from the 1750s onward, leaves performers to choose tempo, phrasing and style, a process called interpretation, so two conductors can make one symphony sound strikingly different.
The law treats the written work and its recordings separately. Copyright is a time-limited monopoly granting a composition's owner exclusive rights, such as publishing sheet music, and lyrics count as part of the composition even when someone else wrote them. Beethoven's 9th Symphony is in the public domain, yet in most countries specific recorded performances of it are still protected.
Source: Musical composition
