composition (music)

The process of creating a piece of music capable of being repeated, as well as the piece of music that is eventually created. The emphasis on repetition distinguishes composition from improvisation. The use of a complex system of musical notation ensures repeatability according to the composer's intentions, though in earlier periods (and still in much Eastern music) oral tradition has played a critical part.

Composition can refer to:

Composition (visual arts), the plan, placement or arrangement of the elements of art in a work Composition (language), in literature, oratory, and rhetoric, producing a work of spoken tradition or written literature Composition (number theory), a way of writing an integer as a sum of positive integers Composition (computer science), combining simpler data types into more complex data types, or function calls into calling functions Composition (natural science), the proportion and combination of certain elements to form a substance Function composition, in mathematics, an operation that takes functions and gives a single function as the result Function composition in computer science, an act or mechanism to combine simple functions to build more complicated ones Relation composition, in mathematics, an operation that takes relations and gives a single relation as the result Musical composition, an original piece of music Composition studies, the professional field of writing instruction MIDI composition