16 Levels of Piano Composition: Easy to Complex

So my name is Nahre Sol, I am a pianist/composer,

and I have been challenged to go through levels

of music complexity at the piano.

[soft piano music]

What's amazing about music composition

is that it explores so much, and the possibilities

are really endless in terms of what you can do with...

[soft piano music]

12 different pitches.

What's incredible is that composition can go to so many

different places, and the possibilities are really endless.

A quick disclaimer, this is based on my interpretation

of the word complexity in this context.

It can mean different things for different people.

And the song I'll be using, Happy Birthday.

It's common, it's familiar,

and if it's your birthday, you're in luck.

At some point in history, someone decided to arrange

these notes in this particular order.

So let's first play it with just one finger,

in the simplest way possible.

[Happy Birthday]

And this is our melody.

With that, I'm going to add just another finger.

[Happy Birthday]

I'm alternating notes.

And I'm creating the simplest form of a bassline.

By adding a third finger...

[Happy Birthday]

I'm supporting the bassline.

Now we have a stronger sense of harmony.

These two fingers are called a drone...

[note chiming]

When played together, and you can hear it in rock shuffle.

[Happy Birthday]

By adding a third finger in the left hand...

[chord chiming]

That's a chord.

If you move these chords around...

[Happy Birthday]

Take it somewhere else.

[Happy Birthday]

But we eventually come back home.

So now I can take this chord.

[chord chiming]

I can break the notes up.

[soft piano music]

Now I have an arpeggio.

[Happy Birthday]

Another way to break up the chords might be...

[Happy Birthday]

Or...

[Happy Birthday]

Where I'm taking the notes of the chord

and I'm opening it up like a fan.

[soft piano music]

This movement is now giving us a deeper sense of rhythm.

So what happens when we take our arpeggio...

Break it up by skipping the second note.

[soft piano music]

These groups of three makes the piece more like a waltz.

You may be familiar with a waltz.

[The Blue Danube]

Or...

[L'Autre Valse d'Amelie]

A waltz is in groups of three.

[Happy Birthday]

One, two, three, one, two, three.

We're beginning to find form.

I could choose different genres

which are in different groups.

[Happy Birthday]

Or rumba.

[Happy Birthday]

Or stride.

[Happy Birthday]

But we're gonna continue with a waltz for now.

So let's go back to the right-hand melody.

The goal is to add more complexity and presence

to the melody by expanding it.

I could make it more complex,

simply by using more than one finger at a time.

[Happy Birthday]

But for this level,

I'm gonna keep it to one finger at a time.

[Happy Birthday]

And add embellishments.

By simply adding notes around the melody,

I am decorating it, almost like adding lacing to something,

and this makes it sound prettier.

There's more emotion to it,

there's more color to the melody.

There are more elaborate ways to do it...

[Happy Birthday]

And in certain cases, you can hear the melody less or more.

Now, a warning on decoration.

Complexity isn't just about a bunch of

added notes and craziness.

One way to interpret the purpose of this video

might be something like this.

[Happy Birthday]

But for me, physicality doesn't equal complexity.

We can make things much more complex in other ways.

So up until now, we've been dealing with the melody.

[Happy Birthday]

And the harmony, so two parts, singer and band.

What happens if we have two singers, two voices?

[Happy Birthday]

Now, if we swap these parts, the main melody

is on the bottom, it's much more complex.

[Happy Birthday]

Add to that a third melody on the bottom, so that the main

melody is sandwiched in between the other two parts.

[Happy Birthday]

It's like having three singers singing together.

So now we're dealing with polyphony, multiple voices, and

the complexity is in the interaction between all of them.

And what's harder is to hear the Happy Birthday melody.

But put away voices for a second.

How else can we make the melody less recognizable?

We can change the rhythm.

So far it's been in groups of three.

[Happy Birthday]

One, two, three, one, two three.

What about groups of four?

[Happy Birthday]

One, two, three, four, one, two, three four.

And now we're gonna make it more complex

by making it five.

One, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five,

one, two, three, four, five,

one, two, three, four, five, one.

So so far, we've been dealing with adding stuff

to the melody and rearranging it in different ways.

Now, in changing the DNA of Happy Birthday,

it's becoming more of a composition.

So before we move on to level 13, let's see what it

sounds like with all of the levels combined.

[Happy Birthday]

So there are different tools that we can use to change

the color, the mood, and the personality

of what we're dealing with.

Say, for example, we add extensions.

[soft piano music]

We can enrichen the harmony.

[Happy Birthday]

Say that we change the harmonic progression,

[Happy Birthday]

Or the scale.

[Happy Birthday]

Or the arrangement of the scale.

[Happy Birthday]

These are all tools that we can use to create new material.

We can also combine certain techniques as well.

[Happy Birthday]

That's Happy Birthday in E major.

Let's take those chords and apply the melody in C major.

[Happy Birthday]

So those levels were about manipulating harmony.

But what does it mean to manipulate the melody?

There are more tools that composers can use

to transform the melody in unrecognizable ways.

These are more abstract.

Let's say we play the melody backwards.

[Happy Birthday backwards]

Or flipped upside-down.

[strange piano music]

Upside-down and backwards.

[strange piano music]

Or fragmented, displace it in different registers.

[Happy Birthday]

These are all techniques that composers use

to abstract the melody and find new material out of it,

kind of like what Picasso does with his paintings,

where he abstracts parts of the human body

and displaces them around the canvas.

So we have one last final level.

The complexity of this last level is really hard

to articulate, because it has to do with creative alchemy

and combining all of the different parts so that

they come together in a way that reflects me as an artist

and what I want to express in music.

You can just prepare a dish, but it's different from

really cooking it with heart and with the soul.

So when you put all of the different levels together,

this is what I would do.

[Happy Birthday]

Complexity isn't something that can be straightforward,

be measured in music, yet it's been an interesting exercise

to notice the different nuances that are involved

in creating something that's complex.

It was super challenging because I didn't really know

what complexity means in the context of music,

because it can be applied to different things.

In this case, I chose to apply it

to certain aspects of music composition,

and it was about the architecture of things.

Tomorrow, I may look at this challenge, if I were to

revisit it, and focus on an entirely different aspect

of music, whether it's sonority or texture

or something completely different.

There are a lot of creative choices along the way

that affect how the final product will turn out to be.

Whatever you do with music, it always has to have

some sort of purpose other than just being

an intellectual exercise, because otherwise,

well, what's the point?

So that's it!

[audience applauding and cheering]

Thanks, Wired.