Becoming a composer: a good idea or not?

[karlhenning]

Then you had people who were in the studio with Monk, under the misprision that he could not read notation . . . .

[Florestan]

Well if it gives you any hope...I started learning the piano 4 years ago, at the age of 42. It was due to a stroke of luck: I rented an apartment which had a piano in it, and I decided to take advantage of the situation. I got myself a teacher and applied myself. I'll never be a good pianist, but practicing almost every day for 4 years does have an effect.

Actually, a piano proper is certainly out of my financial and physical reach: firstly, I couldn't afford it, secondly it wouldn't fit in our apartment --- but I expect a keyboard to land this year. 

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

Good luck and have fun with it. You might be interested in this thread on the subject, which I started a couple of years ago:

http://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,10365.0.html

[Florestan]

Good luck and have fun with it.

Thanks, I'll certainly have --- and I think I'll start a new thread when ready. 

You might be interested in this thread on the subject, which I started a couple of years ago:

http://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,10365.0.html

Interesting stuff there.

Now, back to MI and his thread. 

[Tapio Dimitriyevich Shostakovich]

No, learning to read music is easy. Or it ought to be. And it certainly always seemed easy to me. But in my real job as music teacher I have to face the fact every day that for some pepole it simply isn't easy. Brains are wired differently, and what seems simple and obvious to one is not for another. It's harder, too, for older students. What happens, sometimes, is that the pupil, struggling with reading the music, ends up memorising the piece by default - they've had to repeat it so often just to get the notes up to some kind of speed that it fixes itself in their memories. Which is all very well for that one particular piece, but no help if you're looking to be able to play (or play through) anything and everything.

The translation of "written note"->"what key to press" for an oldie newbie (I'm 39!) is pretty much a question of concentration, it least for me. But it's getting better and it's rewarding, because for the first time I'm being able to understand the written stuff. Admittedly, my range only goes from g up to b' 

[Scarpia]

No, learning to read music is easy. Or it ought to be. And it certainly always seemed easy to me. But in my real job as music teacher I have to face the fact every day that for some pepole it simply isn't easy. Brains are wired differently, and what seems simple and obvious to one is not for another. It's harder, too, for older students. What happens, sometimes, is that the pupil, struggling with reading the music, ends up memorising the piece by default - they've had to repeat it so often just to get the notes up to some kind of speed that it fixes itself in their memories. Which is all very well for that one particular piece, but no help if you're looking to be able to play (or play through) anything and everything. Which is why I ask my pupils to sightread lots, to keep confronting themselves with music they haven't seen before, play through it and move on to the next piece. It's the best way of becoming familiar with a variety of musical 'situations' and at the same time quickly leads to greater fluency with music reading in all its aspects.

You are failing to distinguish different senses of "reading music." 

read notes on page -> play notes

read notes on page -> play notes on instrument in real time

read notes on page -> hear them in your head

hear musical notes -> recognize and write them down

read notes on page -> understand harmony in abstract sense

Learning to read music on a rudimentary level is easy, but developing the related skills can be quite challenging and depends on talent as well as effort.

[Brian]

Does original music enter your mind without your willing it into creation?

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Every single day. I aid and abet it, of course; for instance, I have a mental bookmark of some air-conditioner noises I heard in an art museum in Sydney, Australia in 2006 - two repeated tones, the second a step down from the first - and on Wednesday morning, to get my brain going for a train trip to the Netherlands (you have a wonderful country, Johan! I'd have PMed you about this if it weren't a school trip) - anyways, for just over 50 minutes my brain spun out a fantasmagoria on those two notes, for full symphony orchestra, starting with piano trombones and swelling to include some Petrushka-like festival scenes, a nocturne, a Mexican dance, and a grand summing-up.

Original music pours into my head, sometimes fitfully, sometimes not at all, sometimes in a flood. It's for that reason that I want, nay, need to devote attention to learning the art of setting music to paper, and for that reason that I've taken lessons from posts here by Luke, Cato, and others, and will continue to read with enthusiasm.



P.S. When it's time to finally practice, I plan to warm up with a transcription of Eroica, mvt i, for string quintet. Seems prudent to start with something where the transfer of mind-creation to paper can produce tangibly right or wrong results, MI, so you may want to begin with an arrangement too.

[Cato]

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Every single day....

Original music pours into my head, sometimes fitfully, sometimes not at all, sometimes in a flood. It's for that reason that I want, nay, need to devote attention to learning the art of setting music to paper, and for that reason that I've taken lessons from posts here by Luke, Cato, and others, and will continue to read with enthusiasm.

So that is a start!  Still, there are no guarantees of course, but that is a first step!   0:)

I would recommend determining whether you can accurately notate what you are imagining.  I have read that there are online courses, as well as courses that one can buy, for ear training.  Do not despair: even Arnold Schoenberg admitted that his ability to concentrate and correctly write down what he was imagining, even with his perfect pitch, faded with fatigue, especially as he aged.

You might try e.g. a church hymnal for practice: as you read the music, can you "hear" the melody of hymns you are not acquainted with?  (This is an especially good activity during dull sermons.  0:)  )

An enjoyable way to train your ear is to read scores while listening to recordings!   

[(poco) Sforzando]

To Mirror, eyeresist, Brian, and anyone else similarly inclined:

I think it is highly laudable of each of you to have some desire to compose. I really would like to see all classical music lovers make such an effort. The experience of putting notes on paper and trying to create something musically coherent is challenging in a way that listening by itself is not; and if nothing else, you will probably gain more insight into how other composers' works are constructed and you may feel even more esteem for the music you already admire.

That said, even if you hear music of your own on a train trip or whatever, that's a long way from actual composition. Once you try putting those thoughts into tangible notes on tangible music paper, they have a way of fighting you and forcing you to rethink what you have written until you wrestle through the problems and come out with something that satisfies you.

I'm emphasizing the "writing-down" part because as I think it essential to learn how to read music and master basic theory before you can attempt to be a composer. Composing is not just a matter of spinning out ideas in your head, but in one sense the job of being a composer is not so much to "create music" as to produce a notated score, which the composer then turns over to a performer or performers to realize as music in sound.

I think the idea of seeking out a teacher is a good one, as it's easy to acquire misconceptions about theoretical matters that a teacher can easily correct. (I remember one poster here many years ago wanted to know the difference between the three types of minor keys – natural, harmonic, and melodic.) You can take private lessons, but I think for basic theory a college course will do perfectly well. A good theory teacher will also drill you on sight-singing and dictation in order to help develop your ear. I myself was accepted at the Oberlin Conservatory in 1966 to major in composition, but one reason I left the program was that I never felt my ear training was sufficiently advanced or secure for me to compose the kinds of music I wanted to write.

But I wish you all the best with whatever level of success you achieve in composing. No matter what that may be, it's to be encouraged.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

- and on Wednesday morning, to get my brain going for a train trip to the Netherlands (you have a wonderful country, Johan! I'd have PMed you about this if it weren't a school trip) -

Blasted school trip! But we'll meet on 17th July. And yes, I'm quite positive about the Netherlands, too...

[Szykneij]

But in my real job as music teacher I have to face the fact every day that for some people it simply isn't easy. Brains are wired differently, and what seems simple and obvious to one is not for another.

I couldn't agree more.

[Brian]

To reply in brief and with great thanks to Cato and Sforzando:

Ear training sounds like the most important way to begin. It's an uphill climb and I'll need to start working hard on being able to hear music and know how it could be notated, how composers achieve what they want. The hymn idea seems a good one - best start with baby steps, I suppose! Sforzando, the fact that writing music is so much harder, more challenging, than "hearing" it is in fact exciting to me. I can't wait to face those challenges. The music I dream through a day would not (usually) be something I'd ask performers to actually play, as I'll often spend a few minutes working out and developing themes etc. or thinking about pre-existing music that appears to be influencing what's going on, and each pass over the material yields new different results and directions.

I've got a few works which my brain came up with years ago and which every passing year brings new changes, ideas, reworkings, and new instrumental writing as I mature, and so it makes sense to me that a Mozart-in-Amadeus-style process of simply hearing perfect music, scribbling it out, finding no flaw in the creation and immediately dispatching it to the opera house would in fact be a very disappointing creative process rather than a fulfilling one.

[Cato]

In Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus, the composer Adrian Leverkühn has a hallucinatory conversation with The Devil about the life of a composer.

The Devil laments that "composing has become devilishly hard," given the exhaustion of the tonal system, and that any inspiration, which seems original at first, will suddenly remind one of Rimsky-Korsakov or some other composer, and so the composer despairs.

The Devil then offers inspiration in a deal: his gift seems awfully close to Schoenberg's "composition with12-notes."   

But now..."Schoenberg est Mort!"  0:)

Thomas Mann's devil is not wrong: composition has become devilishly hard.  Modern music is hemidemisemifragmented among assorted -isms: the audience is perhaps less fragmented, but (let's face it) has not come to terms with many of the -isms.

40 years ago Minimalism and Neo-Romanticism and even Neo-Medievalism seemed to bring some new life to tonality.  Electronic instruments offered new sounds and tunings: the latter remains, in general, unacceptable to the audience, the former perhaps moreso.

Some alternatives to the well-known -isms went nowhere: Avenir de Monfred's "New Diatonic Modal Principle of Relative Music" (a system of polymodality) and Tibor Serly's curiously named "Modus Lascivus" (a polyphonic and scalar method of invigorating tonality) and Alexander Tcherepnin's "Interpoint" (a polyphonic method) stayed in the domains of their inventors.  (If anyone knows of a composer using their methods, please let us know!)

So what does the budding composer do?  How can one guide one's inspiration into musica incognita ?

Perhaps one needs to become very acquainted with all these possibilities, and follow one's inspiration after absorbing them: perhaps the inspiration will lead to a variation on one of them, or a synthesis, or by rejecting them and knowing what they have done, the inspiration will create a new path by avoiding the past.

[Rinaldo]

I have this urge inside of me that wants to express myself through music and even though I've played the guitar for 20 years, I still feel like an amateur because of my inability to read music.

Hmm, I'm 29 as well and although I've been making music (mostly songs & experiments on the computer) since my late teens, for the last few years I've been pondering the very same thing. Doesn't really matter to me if it's a good idea or not – it's just something I feel being pulled towards.

So, best of luck to both of us, eh?

The problem is when "you" try to write like someone else.  Which reminds me of the trite saying, "be yourself, everyone else is taken".

This.

What happens, sometimes, is that the pupil, struggling with reading the music, ends up memorising the piece by default - they've had to repeat it so often just to get the notes up to some kind of speed that it fixes itself in their memories. Which is all very well for that one particular piece, but no help if you're looking to be able to play (or play through) anything and everything.

Exactly my case. I'm playing the piano simply from visual memory (of which keys to hit) and I've yet to play a piece I don't know by ear, which helps me "cheat" (by not paying attention to the length of notes, for example). I hope I'll be able to gradually lose all these bad habits and learn to read music properly.

[Cato]

It is my belief that composing music, or creating any kind of art, is hard, but has always been hard, and is not any harder today than at any time in the past.  The point is to find a process, system, method, whatever, that you enjoy using and just go for it.  If writing tonal music is your thing; do it and don't spend time worrying if your music will be "new" enough.  You are the only you and by definition the music you write will be unique, or at least, being the best "you" possible will produce results uniquely yours.  The problem is when "you" try to write like someone else.  Which reminds me of the trite saying, "be yourself, everyone else is taken".

True to an extent: Thomas Mann's devil is of course referring to the difficulty of competing with the past 300 years for people's attention e.g. Handel did not need to compete against the entire 19th-century, from Beethoven to Bruckner, not to mention now the entire 20th century, from Ives to Copland.

The 21st-century composer finds himself competing with everyone from Vivaldi to Stockhausen, so determining one's individual sound is more difficult than ever: to be sure, it is not impossible.  Two composers here at GMG, Karl Henning and Luke Ottevanger have developed distinctive styles.  Their antecedents hover, but do not impose themselves.

"Yeah, that sounds like Hindemith."  How should the budding composer react?  A compliment?  Or dismayed that his work "sounds like Hindemith" ?   

[karlhenning]

Competing?  That is not my attitude.

In ways, though, it is the reality. You write a piece. It would be nice if this orchestra, or that chamber group, might play it.  They feel that they need to program music that people already know, that people already like (the 300 years of established literature): you cannot compete against that.

Or, they do like to program the occasional piece of new music!  But they go to living composers who already have a name: tough to compete against that.

[karlhenning]

Sure - but, mainly, like 90% of my thinking is not about those issues but instead trying to figure out the piece I am working on that week and the hope to get it where I will be satisfied with how it came out.

Absolutely!

My impression is that Mann (in something of the same milieu as Brahms) felt that the accumulated great Literature of German Composers breathed down one's neck.  No, I don't feel that way, either.

[DavidW]

After reading about that novel in the Rest is Noise, I've had a hankering to read it.  Anyway I don't think that any fledgling composers should feel the burden of the past, they're not out to be the next Beethoven, just write some music, so they should just write what they like imo, what but do I know?

[DavidW]

So, now you went back to haydnfan?

Yeah I decided to stick with it, and just remind people in the text below who I am.

[eyeresist]

Well, I don't mean to derail the thread, but there are lots of pieces that Bach wrote for keyboard that I can hear as chamber music.  It is my "dream" to make such transcriptions.   (Something along the lines of the well known transcription of the Goldberg Variations for string trio.)  But the idea it is unlikely to find good musicians interested in playing them puts a damper on it.

I would like to transcribe Prokofiev's piano sonatas to string quartet. I can't help feeling he wrote them for the "wrong" instrument.