From the Composer's Hermitage

Recent conversations with composing students and colleagues have refreshed my awareness of the composing process. I believe I've written similar things before on this blog, and that just goes to show how true to my experience these things are.

1. Composing is a discipline, just like practicing or performing. You don't really know and understand about it until you are regularly working at it. Also, the dynamics of the process can be forgotten rather quickly during a hiatus from daily composing work.

2. Thinking you're writing for posterity or comparing you work with the great music you already know while you're trying to write it is a fast track to writer's block.

3. Sometimes, you need to write a lot of a thing to get it out of your system and move on to some stuff you might think is better.

4. Instead of trying to compete with Beethoven's finished works in one's sketches (!) think of your work as student work or experimentation. Explore lots of ways of generating material to keep from getting locked up: set a text, improvise, choose an existing model for some aspect of your work . . .

5. What you really need is a very clear assignment. Sometimes, you get stuck because the assignment you have given yourself isn't detailed enough.

6. And there is that stage in composing during which you feel like you're just spinning your wheels. This might happen with every work you write. There are minutes, hours, days, etc., when it seems like you've wasted your time, that nothing of worth has come out. For someone who isn't regularly involved in the discipline, this can be very discouraging.

How should you deal with this wheel-spinning time?
A. Know it's normal.
B. Have composer friends who can let you know it's normal.
C. Be a trouvere. That's an old word for "composer" that comes from the same root as the modern French verb for "to find." The point is that composing is a search in sonic and spiritual realms which usually involves some wandering and some groping about.
D. Know that those tedious times might be more than just a hassle to endure. They appear to be necessary for actual productivity. As John Cage put it, "the way to get ideas is to do something boring. For instance, composing in such a way that the process of composing is boring induces ideas. They fly into one's head like birds." 

7. Think like even more of a genius than you are. Notice, for example that Beethoven edited his pretty rudimentary materials into greatness. You, too, should try editing. Also, particularly important for developing well-rounded complete works is  thinking like Mozart, Hindemith, or Britten: have a vision of the whole. Carry it with you away from your usual composing station. Develop the habit of recognizing and moving along the continuum between your big ideas and actual notes on the page.

8. Pay attention to the engineers of other structures. They are your company, too. For example, 2000 years ago, Vitruvius declared three facets of architectural expression - "commodity, firmness, and delight." These aspects are indispensables of the composer's construction work,too. You must take into account your work's use. You need to apply excellent craft. And your basic impulse is probably to create something with aesthetic appeal. In terms of use, knowing who you are writing for is a big part of the clear assignment. Beyond that, when the current use and cultural context have become things of the past, the quality of craftsmanship will still be apparent. And we all want to touch and move the audience.

9. There's a wonderful moment when you have passed through the basic discovery of materials, the tedium, and the conceiving of the overall structure. In that moment, you finally see the big picture and have filled in enough details to know how the rest of the work is to be composed. And you know how to do it! That's the climax. From there on in, it's smooth sailing. After you have a few pieces under your belt, you actually develop an appetite for the work that gets you to that vantage point. I think it's then that you realize you really are a composer.

10. Finally, a word on inspiration. Some of the greatest composers have prayed for it. I have, at times, too. That prayer is a challenge and involves a bit of trepidation. It requires trusting that God will provide something through the process and suggests that you would dare try to intermingle your conscious human efforts with some mysterious mission above your own. Doing the work of composing as a follow-up to that prayer is a blessing that can build your faith.

So True: Things I Was Told and Subsequently Learned About Composing

Here's a post I wrote in June but for some reason never published until now (July 11).

1. Composing = editing.

Dr. Benjamin made this point repeatedly and I disliked it back then. But now I know it's true and I have accepted it.

Finale is great for this process because you easily create draft after draft after draft without feeling the tediousness that rewriting and copying by hand involve.


2. For me, composition seems to work best when I keep it in the realm of the experimental.

Writing for my reputation, for an effect, for posterity - all of these seem to shut down my creativity and bring on writer's block. But when I give myself a clear musical assignment, a one-time exploratory activity, things flow much, much better.

The assignment, or plan, is the generator, as le Corbusier put it. It gets things started and powers them. But often, once things get going, the logic of the sounds takes over and pilots the course of the piece from there on out.

The semesterly composers' concerts and writing for Meherrin Chamber Orchestra at Chowan gave me plenty of opportunities to write with this experimental mindset. Since I wasn't in a formalized composition program in school, I missed out on participating in the regimen of composers' concerts and forums, but my experience at Chowan provided something like those things. Kudos to my colleague, James M. Guthrie, who continues this good work at Chowan. Also, thank you to him for his faith and subtle mentoring. His musing comments in the hallway often led to my own compositional assignments - questions like "Have you ever written a piece in which the pedal stays down the whole time?" or "Have you tried any mirror writing?"


3. Most of the time, composing is not about creating new materials. It's about what to do with the musical materials that already exist.

We've had centuries of creation of materials. It's pretty hard to come up with some completely new basic musical idea at this point. But how to use the ideas and styles that already exist, and what you can say by how you use them, that's the name of the game.

I don't mean to discourage the garage-band musician who believes he or she is working in complete freedom and disdains all rules. That musician's involvement with music may be an expression of non-conformity, but composition itself is almost always a dialog with the principles of an existing style or styles, whether or not the composer is conscious of this. (I suppose non-conformity is too, actually.)


4. It's okay to be tonal.

Since composing is about dialoging with a style or styles, it stands to reason that one would do well to write in dialog with a style they know well. That's part of why I feel okay about being a tonally-based composer. It worked out just fine for Bach and Beethoven as well as Schnittke and Part, also Alice Parker and Bernstein, as well as tons of film composers and composers of music for worship, etc. This is not to disparage atonality but to recognize that I have a good sense of how the materials of tonality work and how they have been used by many composers over the centuries. So tonality is naturally a big part of my vocabulary.