Building Towards a Musical Climax

One of the highest goals for every composer should be to gain control over every element of their music. While this is a very simple thing to say, it is incredibly tricky and takes a lot of experience to reach that point.

A great possibility to observe the amount of control a composer has over his/her craft is to check out how they build towards musical climaxes. 

Now we all might agree that in order to create a fulfilling build up we need to raise tension that eventually releases in the big climax (or doesn't if you want to be extra special). And this is where the need of control comes into play.

Creating tension in music is not a singular factor but there are several ways to do that:

• create melodic tension by ascending melodic arcs
• create harmonic tension by introducing more instable chords and tenseful chord progressions
• create rhythmic tension by gradually using smaller note values, change chords more frequently
• create textural tension by gradually introducing more instrumental colours that fill up the harmonic spectrum
• create tension through dynamics by changing the dynamic degree of the music
• create tension through range by gradually using larger intervals in your melodies

It is actually not that tricky to gain control at the same time over one or two, maybe even three of these points, but in order to create a really exciting and musically fulfilling buildup, we should strive to have control over all these points at the same time. And this is where it gets really tricky.

It can often be observed when you listen to music by learning composers that you actually find a build-up in their music that in fact builds up a few of these factors but at the same time they might not have conscious control over another factor that maybe stalls or even does the opposite by becoming more relaxed and therefore contradicts what the composer is trying to do.

One of my personal favourite musical build-ups with an incredible amount of control and an extremely rewarding pay-off is the middle section of Leia's Theme by John Williams. Listen closely to the section starting at 3:14 and how each and every element in this build-up works towards raising tension. I would recommend giving it several listens and observe each factor mentioned above individually.

As I said, it takes a lot of experience to write a build-up with this much control over every factor. The problem lies in the fact that you cannot run through the points above one by one and adjust accordingly. If you do so you will find out that changing one element to be "more build-up-y" will often result in deflating the tension in another element. So to actually have it under control means to have such a deep understanding of the music that you can control these factors at the same time.

A great way to practice these things is to write "written out crescendos". Set out to write an orchestral crescendo over several bars that doesn't rely on just increasing dynamics but rather try to incorporate the elements from above. Don't be discouraged if you fail to incorporate everything at first try. This will come over time.