[imonlsd]

So I have decided to make a song for an English project on The Grapes of Wrath. The two 'themes' I was interested in were either:

A. The Anger of the People
B. The Unity/Strength of the People.

My question is, how would I go about composing music for this? Minor scales for sadness, or what?
Also, what genre would you think would be most appropriate for either of the themes? Thanks in advance.

[gusfcc4ever]

Dont even think in major/minor, in order to use melody in more creative ways its heaps easier to blend the two together (essentially what a blues scale is) I reckon what you should be focusing on is dissonance and looking at interesting ways to resolve that to more stable, root chords. That way, you have this tension and inharmonious sound that evolves into a beautiful and happy sounding chord. Thats what I think anyway. try adding 7ths and 9ths to add intersesting color notes to your sound.

[Djreject]

well appararently you have here a very distinct opposition

anger and chaos vs unity and order

It sound like a good start for a two part piece, this is a very dualist approach, and it's one of the easier to work with.

You can can start by ordering themes from the book and try to do parralels with musical motions,

E.g:

Chaos can be associated with ascending and descending melodic line, which ends in very abrupt way (that would be the anger part).
vs
Unity can be expressed by the exact opposite, which would be very long and parallel melodic line, which are orchestrated in a big crescendo (like those people uniting each other slowly into a solid group that is the people)


I'd recommend starting to work with such a method, rather than asking yourself what kind of scale to use, it's gonna allow you to set up the STRUCTURE of the piece before even having started to lay down notes and melodies...