Musical Doodles: Have Fun Writing Music
This charming illustrated book from Paul Harris is chock full of composition inspiration
This post is a reader request; several people got in touch recommending the book. I’ve also read positive reviews from David Barton and Andrew Eales.
The concept of Musical Doodles is simple: doodling on a page can be a wonderful way to create music.
The execution is really gorgeous. Charmingly illustrated throughout by Bill Jones, the book is full of imaginative prompts to get you started with composition.
Liberated by doodling
When I first heard about this book, I was mildly skeptical. That was because the approach Paul Harris encourages in Musical Doodles is not how I normally compose. I don’t doodle, I noodle. I sit at the piano, play something, listen carefully, and think about what comes next. I feel happy at the piano, it’s how I’ve always worked and I have a process that works. By contrast, sitting down at a desk with some manuscript paper puts me far out of my comfort zone. I do obviously write out my pieces, but only once I’m nearly finished with the composition process. The idea of starting with notation felt very weird to me.
As I read the book, I was reassured to discover that the text is written in Paul Harris’ typically encouraging and thoughtful style. I’ve never met him, but by now I’ve used enough of his books (probably more than twenty!) to get the sense that he must be a really lovely guy.
Even so, I wasn’t sure that Musical Doodles would work that well. But somewhat to my surprise, it proved to be really fun to work through the ideas.
One of my favourites was on page 28, where we are instructed to “doodle” a couple of bars of music, then use a mirror to write out a mirrored answer to what you’ve just written. I was familiar with the concept, but it had never really occurred to me to actually just sit down and mess around with it, and certainly not to use an actual mirror. The result was kinda cool:
Another I really enjoyed was the simple instruction to make up your own scale. I selected notes at random and it turned out to be weirdly good, especially when I tried harmonising it and realised that the two chords that worked best were D♭ and A:
What I find most interesting about these examples is that I would never have come up with them while sitting at the piano, because my hands would have gone to their old comfortable positions.
To my surprise, doodling turned out to be liberating!
As a result, this book strikes me as the kind of resource I might turn to when I’m looking for inspiration but I’m not coming up with anything interesting using my typical method of noodling at the piano.
I’ve got a few resources along these lines, including Karen Schlimp’s excellent Impromosaik reviewed below, as well as Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies (available to purchase as a physical deck of cards and for free as a webpage). They’re really good for scrambling the brain out of its usual patterns and as such are pretty much essential if you’re composing regularly!
Using this book in lessons
This is not your average composition book and it’s certainly not designed to give your students a comprehensive training. Nevertheless I think it is worth investing in. Here are two obvious uses:
1. As lesson prompt
Many of the pages would make prompts for a 5-10 minute creative activity in a piano lesson. These may not lead to a fully completed composition, but as I’ve addressed elsewhere, that is not necessarily a bad thing!
One page in particular stands out: the page where you are prompted to turn your name into a melody. This activity has almost universal appeal — I actually did this with most of my students even before reading Musical Doodles — but the page itself is really well thought through and very attractive, so students will definitely enjoy it.
2. As a lending library book
This would be a great book to have in your lending library to lend to enthusiastic composers, especially when they’re having one of those inevitable moments where the inspiration is a bit lacking.
Conclusion
There are several useful composition books out there for teachers (including Carol Klose’s wonderful Piano Teacher’s Guide to Creative Composition, of which I’m a particularly big fan, as you can tell by the title of my review!)
Musical Doodles is different: it’s less formal, more whimsical; less structured, more playful.
That difference is critical. Paul Harris puts enjoyment at the forefront of the composition process.
If we want our students to fall in love with composition, that’s something we should do too. Musical Doodles is a great place to start.
Musical Doodles: Have Fun Writing Music is written Paul Harris, illustrated by Bill Jones, and published by Faber Music.