Check out Larry Solomon's music theory and composition site.

I think a good course in music history, with plenty of critical listening
over a variety of styles, would be an excellent beginning to studying
composition. I used to write fiction and poetry, and I often felt that the
best writers were those who were most widely read, not those who had taken
the most creative writing workshops. Music, however, has a more definite
technique in some styles, it is a more technical field in some senses and in
those styles.

I'm just saying it's good to know when sonata-variation form started, what
it sounded like compared to the earlier forms, and when it mutated into
something else and what that sounds like. That way, you don't get hung up
thinking you HAVE to obey thus and so a set of rules. The rules change from
time to time, for good reason. At any given time, nobody much knows what
they really are, critics and analysts figure that out later after composers
quit playing with them.

Nevertheless, a sense of functional tonal harmony, the rudiments of voice
leading, how to generate a bridge to get from one section of  a piece to
another with or without a jar, as desired, and the basic principles of
orchestration (more basic than instrument ranges: how to arrange choirs of
instruments without muddying the sound) are pretty basic and have persisted
for centuries.

More advice: listen to your own pieces very often, until you can't stand
them. The particular thing that you can't stand - don't do that again. The
particular thing that you can stand, that grabs you, that compels
attention - cut it free of the detritus and let it work by itself, or
against a better background, or make a variation of it in another context.

Yet more advice: generate scraps of this and that. Cut and paste, mix and
match. In other words, freely generate acoustical and musical material, and
then in a more objective and disciplined mode, organize that material.

Make sketches of what you hear, if you can notate it, or just draw what it
sounds like if you can't - then try to put together orcs and scos, or
sections of soundfiles, that realize that sketch. Very hard!


-----Original Message-----
From: Hans Mikelson 
To: csound@noether.ex.ac.uk 
Date: Friday, May 15, 1998 10:16 PM
Subject: Composing


>Hello,
>
>I think I'm beginning to move from the realm of sound experiments to the
>realm of sound composition so I suppose that it wouldn't hurt for me to
>learn something about composing.  There is a good web site with composing
>information at:
>
>http://www-personal.umich.edu/~fields/gems/0.htm
>
>
>I thought the section on dramatic shape of a composition was good since
with
>Csound you are often working with collections of sound rather than just
>musical notes.
>
>Can anyone reccomend some other sites?
>
>Bye,
>Hans Mikelson
>
>