Working Backwards

When writing music, in certain situations it might be benefitial to work your way through it backwards rather than forward. What I mean by that is that it is generally easier to set yourself a musical target, like a key signature or a climax chord or any other specific point that you want to reach in the music and take this as a base to work your way backwards to plausibly lead there.

This strategy is particularly helpful in rather complex situations or lengthy development passages. Particularly working out chord progressions like this can be really effective as we always perceive a harmonic situation based on what was before it.

So let's imagine you write a piece where you arrived at a point where you know that in about four bars you need or want to reach a new key, let's say C major. Setting this as a target and work backwards is considerably easier than working forward from where you left off and hopeing to land on the target. Especially when you still sometimes struggle to keep all properties of your music under control, this will make things easier.

So working backwards from that target of C, you could decide that you maybe want to reach it by a V-I, so let's put a G7 in front of it. You could arrive at this G7 through another dominant so a D7 before might work, or you set up a ii-V-I so you could have a Dm7, or maybe over a IV-V-I so an F would work as well. Depending on which key you're coming from and whether you want to work with cadential harmony as in the example or you want to be more modal or even chromatic with your modulation path of course you need to still find a good "switch" or "pivot chord" to introduce the new tonality. Doing this backwards strategy rather mindlessly might just transition a potential awkward harmonic progression away from the target chord, so just going after the standard paths will not make the challenge of modulating go away but it might help you to reach more confidently at the target.

The working backwards strategy works however quite well in other contexts as well. For instance you need to score a scene where you need to hit a pivotal moment with the music. In this case, you might want to score that pivotal moment first and then work backwards from there to reach that moment as effectively as possible and also not overshoot beforehand.

Same applies for even larger structures. Scoring the climax scene of a movie first to set the "maximum drama" for the entire movie and then work your way backwards through the movie will help to not accidentally score something before the climax too big and then not having enough headroom left when reaching the actual climax.

All these considerations of course don't take away the need to have what you're doing decently under control but it can help to simplify a few things.

As said at the beginning, this is not something that is needed to be done every time as in many occasions you might simply know how you get to a target but especially in moments when you are stuck and need to find a bridge from point A to point B, changing the perspective into backwards mode might help finding a solution.