In music, precompositional decisions are those decisions which a composer decides upon before or while beginning to create a composition. These limits may be given to the composer, such as the length or style needed, or entirely decided by the composer. Music is a human activity which involves structured and audible sounds, which is used for artistic or aesthetic, entertainment, or ceremonial purposes. ... A composer is a person who writes music. ... Musical composition is: an original piece of music the structure of a musical piece the process of creating a new piece of music // A musical composition A piece of music exists in the form of a written composition in musical notation or as a single acoustic event (a live performance...

Precompositional decisions may also include which key, scale, musical form, style, genre, or idiom in which to write, to use techniques such as the twelve tone technique, serialism, or not to use a system at all. Other examples may include isorhythm, ostinato, passacaglia, chaconne, rhythms, or chord progression. In music theory, the key identifies the tonic triad, the chord, major or minor, which represents the final point of rest for a piece, or the focal point of a section. ... In music, a scale is a set of musical notes that provides material for part or all of a musical work. ... The term musical form is used in two related ways: a generic type of composition such as the symphony or concerto the structure of a particular piece, how its parts are put together to make the whole; this too can be generic, such as binary form or sonata form Musical... Style may refer to genre, design, format, or appearance, including: Clothing: fashion Flower part: flower Music: music genre Sundial part: Gnomon Titles or honorifics: Style (manner of address) including Chinese courtesy names Web design: Cascading Style Sheets Writing: style guide and literary genre Linguistics: Variation in language use of an... A music genre is a category (or genre) of pieces of music that share a certain style or basic musical language (van der Merwe 1989, p. ... An idiom is an expression (ie. ... Twelve-tone technique is a system of musical composition devised by Arnold Schoenberg. ... In the European classical music theory, serialism is a set of methods for composing and analyzing works of music based on structuring those works around the parameterization of parts of music: that is, ordering pitch, dynamics, instrumentation, rhythm and on occasion other elements into a row or series in which... Isorhythm (iso or same) consists of an order of durations or rhythms, talea (cutting, plural taleae), which is repeated within a tenor melody whose pitch content or series, color (repetition), varied in the number of members from the talea. ... Ostinato, an Italian word meaning stubborn (compare English obstinate), is to classical music what riffs are to popular music. ... In music a passacaglia (French: passacaille, Spanish: pasacalle) is a musical form and the corresponding court dance. ... In music a chaconne is a musical form. ... // Rhythm (Greek ρυθμός = tempo) is the variation of the duration of sounds or other events over time. ... A chord progression (also chord sequence and harmonic progression or sequence), as its name implies, is a series of chords played in an order. ...

Precompositional decisions do not necessarily, and almost always do not, preclude compositional decisions, and may actually allow the initial consideration of the choices to be made. One might say that, "thus, while it liberates imagination as to what the world may be, it refuses to legislate as to what the world is" (Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World). Thus precompositional decisions do not necessarily ease the compositional choices. Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970), was an influential British philosopher, logician, and mathematician, working mostly in the 20th century. ...

On the other hand the concept of precompositional decisions is unclear as it is often impossible to determine which decisions occur before or during a composition.

External links

• Improvisation and Precomposition: The Eternal Cycle