You have reached the end of this book, but not the end of the subject — you have reached its beginning. What you hold now is a working foundation: you can read and write notation, harmonize and shape a melody, build a form, and score music for real instruments, all inside a tool you know. That is enough to compose, and to keep composing. This last appendix points the way onward — the books, scores, and habits that will carry you from where this book stops toward wherever you want to go.
Keep composing
The first and most important advice is the simplest: write music, constantly. No book, this one included, teaches composition the way composing does. Finish pieces — actually finish them, cadence and all — because a finished short piece teaches more than a dozen abandoned grand ones. Write a great deal, accept that much of it will be ordinary, and keep going; fluency comes only from volume. Set yourself small, concrete projects (a sixteen-bar minuet, a theme and two variations, a short piece for a friend who plays an instrument) and complete them. Everything below serves this; none of it substitutes for it.
Books worth owning
A handful of standard texts go deeper than an introduction can, each in its own domain. Read them slowly, at the keyboard, and alongside your own writing.
- Alan Belkin, Musical Composition: Craft and Art. A wise, practical book on how pieces actually hold together — melody, harmony, form, and musical flow — from a composer who explains why, not just what. Belkin’s companion guides (on counterpoint, harmony, and orchestration) are outstanding and much of his writing is freely available online. Start here.
- Walter Piston, Harmony. The classic, thorough harmony text — the detailed, rigorous treatment of the ground Part 2 introduced. His Counterpoint and Orchestration are equally respected.
- Samuel Adler, The Study of Orchestration. The standard modern orchestration text, comprehensive and clear, with recorded examples. When you are ready to go beyond Part 7, this is the book. (Rimsky-Korsakov’s older Principles of Orchestration, free on IMSLP, is a beautiful complement.)
- Arnold Schoenberg, Fundamentals of Musical Composition. A deep study of how themes, phrases, and forms are built — demanding, but illuminating on the logic of musical construction.
- Kent Kennan, Counterpoint. A practical, exercise-based path into the contrapuntal writing Chapter 28 only introduced.
Do not buy them all at once. Belkin and Adler will serve you for years; add the others as your curiosity leads.
Scores and listening
You will learn as much from the music itself as from any book — more, if you read and listen (Chapter 39).
- IMSLP (the International Music Score Library Project, imslp.org) is a vast, free library of public-domain scores: nearly the entire classical repertoire, ready to download, read, and study. It is the single most valuable resource on this list.
- Study the small before the large. Begin with string quartets, piano sonatas, and chamber works, where the texture is easy to follow, before tackling full symphonies.
- Read along while listening. Follow a score with a recording playing, connecting the notation to the sound — the fastest way to absorb how music is put together, and the culmination of this book’s ear-and-eye method.
- Copy out passages you admire, by hand or into MuseScore. Composers have always learned by transcribing the masters; it teaches from the inside.
Tools and community
- MuseScore will keep growing with you; explore its more advanced features (custom instruments, more detailed playback, plugins) as you need them, and keep it updated.
- musescore.com hosts an enormous library of user-created and public-domain scores you can open, study, and play directly.
- Share your music. Play it for friends, post it, find other composers online or locally. Feedback and performance — hearing real players play your notes — teach lessons no software can.
- Keep your ear sharp. Simple ear-training sites (musictheory.net, teoria.com) and regular sight-singing or playing will strengthen the inner hearing that all composition rests on.
A final word
Composition is not a talent you are born with or without; it is a craft, learned slowly, by doing it — and you have now begun. The tune from the Preface that you followed all the way to a full orchestral score was never the point; you learning to make such a thing was the point, and you can. Be patient with yourself, write more than you think you should, listen widely and closely, and return to these resources as questions arise. The rest is a lifetime of music, and it is yours to write.
Open a new score, and begin.