I'm proud to say I'm exhibiting with the CodaChrome Collective at the 2023 Midwest Clinic! Come visit me at booth no. 1814 and learn more about the pieces below. Whether you're a band director, orchestra conductor, or performer, I have music that’ll interest everyone — and at all grade levels.
A theme and variations inspired by football instant replays. Kids love it and multiple middle school bands won “1st place” when performing it at the Festival In The Parks, Cedar Point 2022.
I'm proud to say I'm exhibiting at the 2022 Midwest Clinic! Come visit me at booth no. 2008 and learn more about the pieces below. Whether you're a band director, orchestra conductor, or performer, I have music that’ll interest everyone — and at all grade levels.
A theme and variations inspired by football instant replays. Kids love it and multiple middle school bands won “1st place” at the Festival In The Parks, Cedar Point 2022 performing it.
Whether you’re just starting out at composing or have been writing music for decades, improving your composing skills can help you find greater technical mastery, artistic fulfillment, and career success.
Deliberately developing your composing skills is especially important if you’re not yet as good of a composer as you hope to be (which describes most of us composers).
That said, the “best” way to get better at composing depends on what you're trying to improve.
Here are five suggestions:
1. Mastering Specific Techniques
Specific techniques are most easily practiced in isolation. This is why universities teach specific courses on harmony, ear training, counterpoint, orchestration, film scoring, etc.
If you want to learn the full suite of standard compositional skills, a university degree is a good option — but it’s not the only one.
Nowadays, you can also learn any of these topics from online courses and teachers, both paid and free. So, for instance, if you feel fine with your counterpoint chops, but what to deepen your orchestration skills, you can, say, follow Thomas Goss at Orchestration Online or study IU’s Instrumental Studies for Eyes and Ears.
That said, composing cannot be reduced to isolated techniques. The next level of mastery is understanding how these techniques work together.
2. Mastering Existing Styles or Creating Your Own
Style is the most basic way that musical elements work together. Simply put, musical style is the specific combination of characteristic timbres, rhythms, harmonies, textures, and forms that give a piece its unique sound.
Whether you want to write in existing styles or to create your own, here are four good options for learning style:
Copy scores or transcribe recordings. At its best, these practices force you to notice all the little details in a piece. However, if you copy scores mechanically, you’ll mostly just improve your notation software or penmanship skills without learning much about the music itself. Likewise, transcribing works best when you slowly increase the difficulty to match your ability.
Score study. Without copy scores or transcribing recordings, you can still learn a lot by simply studying the score. Although solid theory chops greatly help, you don’t need a theory PhD to do this. You just need keep an eye out for patterns and trends.
Writing pastiches. One of the best ways to learn a particular style is to try writing in it. Take the elements you learned from score study and replicate them using your own pitches/rhythms. Mastering pre-existing styles is one path to developing one’s own style.
Experimenting with unusual materials. This is the route most commonly found in university composition courses. Working with unusual sounds gets you out of our comfort zone and forces you to imagine possibilities you otherwise wouldn't have.
Many composers develop their own style using combination of these strategies—but remember that developing your “artistic voice” is bigger than musical style.
3. Creating Meaningful Forms and “Magical” Moments
The chord that gives you goosebumps, an ostinato that rivets you to your seat, the tune that gets stuck in your head — moments like these are why we’re all here. We hope to experience something magical.
Music cognition research has shown that this “musical magic” is NOT a product of style. Having a “signature sound” does little to help you create these effects. Rather, musical magic happens through repetition, tension, and surprise.
As with studying style, learning how to creating meaningful forms and magical moments requires you to study how the elements of music work in coordination.
For this, score study and analysis are a MUST. However, rather than labelling features (as in stylistic analysis), in analyzing musical magic one must focus on relationships and timing.
Though some insightful teachers and courses explain these elements in ad hoc ways, the Wizarding School for Composers is the only composition course that systematically shows the compositional processes required to create musical magic.
4. Streamlining Your Creative Process
Up to this point, we’ve been talking about ways to improve your craft. Though craft ensures you can express yourself freely, it’s the larger creative process that ensures you have something meaningful to say.
Many composers' creative processes are woefully underdeveloped, so they procrastinate and are self-critical — but that doesn't have to be you.
The creative process has specific steps and procedures you can learn. Read Nico Muhly's “Diary” essay from the London Review of Books, Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit, or David Usher's Let the Elephants Run for ideas.
Your goal is to create "workflows": replicable procedures that enable you to reliably accomplish specific musical tasks.
"Composing" is not a specific task any more than (say) “farming” or “house building” is. "Write an 8-bar melody in the style of George Gershwin" is.
5. Improving at Self-Evaluation
The tips I listed above are essential to developing a mature ability to self-evaluate. As you improve on them, you will likewise grow in confidence about your musical and artistic judgment.
Until you've developed that ability, get a teacher. They'll be able to help you understand how all these pieces fit together in a way that you cannot until you've mastered them (which takes at least a decade).
Third, even after you've mastered them, seek feedback, and even lessons, from your peers. Composers tend to be bad about this. They think that they can or should work in isolation. The truth is that humans are social creatures, and whether is bread baking, athletics, or composing, we improve best in collaboration with each other.
Your Next Steps
Now that you've read the list, what should you do? Here are two good ways of knowing:
Ask a teacher or peer who knows you and your music
Follow your gut
I'm guessing (/hoping) you already have ideas — follow those.
I’m also happy to meet with composers (for free!) to talk about their music and goals and identify what next steps they can take. Feel free to schedule a call with me.
Let’s talk about that feeling of “I’m not good enough.”
Or of “My music is too ____ or not enough ____ to be successful.”
Or, most of all, of “I don’t deserve my successes. When others find me out, they’ll mock and shun me.”
As you know, these feelings are often called “Imposter Syndrome.”
You probably also know, intellectually at least, that Imposter Syndrome is universal. That every single individual has an accuser in their head who criticizes all their flaws, mistakes, and weaknesses — especially the ones no one else notices.
But what you might not realize is WHY Imposter Syndrome is universal — and why that truth about imposter syndrome is what’s holding you back from getting more commissions and performances.
What’s Really Behind Imposter Syndrome
So let me cut to the chase. Here’s the secret: Imposter Syndrome is universal because it’s part of your transition into adulthood.
It’s about shifting from that place where you mostly learn from and follow others — to the one where you contribute and teach as often as you learn. In other words, it’s about stepping into the authority that all adults have.
True, we don’t all have the same authorities — and many people have only a handful — but we are all authorities in one sphere or another.
With your adult authority comes many responsibilities, the foremost of which is leadership.
And it’s the leadership — not whether you’re “good enough” — that’s terrifying.
Why That’s So Scary
For most people, leadership is frightening on multiple levels, because it means
Finding people and persuading them to follow you, rather than being able to just command them
No longer being able to just “do your own thing”: you must often (if not always) consider others’ needs, desires, and perspectives
Being accountable for what you say and do: at least someone will copy what you do and echo what you say
Opening up your words and actions for criticism, both the valid and supportive as well as the misinformed and malicious
Charting the course and encouraging your followers, even when you are filled with uncertainty
But what’s most scary about it is that — unlike jobs, titles, or accolades — leadership is never conferred. It’s given by those who choose to follow us.
Even if you hold an important job, title, or accolade, you still must step into leadership. These positions are merely platforms for leadership, not automatic conferrals of it. If you antagonize people from your platform, they will follow you only when forced. If you do nothing with your fancy title or big prize, people will soon forget about you.
What This Means for Composers (and Creatives Generally)
Composers often don’t admit that their leadership entails more than their creative skills, because they want to be known for their skills — not their leadership.
What composers (and creatives) so often get wrong about leadership is that they think it is or should be directly tied to their creative or technical skill: “Who’s the best writer?” or “Who’s the best orchestrator?” or “Who can write the best fugue?” or “Who’s the most imaginative and original creative?”
Here’s the truth: People don’t choose follow you based on your skills; they follow you based on where and how you’re leading them.
. . . Or, as I often say, “There is a baseline of competence beyond which comparisons become increasingly irrelevant.”
. . . Or, to be more explicit, “People choose their playlists based on what they love and desire — and if that happens to be what’s best, that’s a bonus.”
Because your primary job as an artist is to speak to people’s fears and desires — not be technically or creatively excellent — the hard skills required for creative leadership are often quite low.
MBAs and CEOs know this, because their expertise (ironically) is in being generalists. Hollywood composers also know this, because they often must work on teams.
But many other creatives — especially those who work primarily alone — often don’t admit that their leadership entails more than just their skills, because they want to be known for their skills.
When composers insist that others connect with them on those terms, they constrict their possibilities for leadership; box themselves into a competitive, zero-sum space; and, ironically, amplify the very imposter syndrome they’re trying to escape.
“How, Then, Do I Escape Imposter Syndrome?”
So my invitation to you is to consider these questions:
Why would people care about my music besides its technical or creative merits?
What experience does my music offer them? What does it enable them to do in their lives? Or think about themselves? Or feel?
How do I make it easy for them to experience those things?
What experience do I offer them, in addition to being the name credited for the notes?
How do I make it easy for others to connect with me personally?
These questions apply to all composers — from the most conventional and crowd pleasing to the most experimental and esoteric — because your goal is never to lead everyone, but to serve the specific people for whom your gifts and proclivities are best suited.
Answering these questions shifts your focus away from competition and comparison and toward relationships and connection.
No one (usually) feels like an imposter when they’re with their best friend or their lover. Nor do they (usually) feel like an imposter when they are taking care of someone. Or laughing with them. Or listening to them. Or helping them out.
Composing (and creative work generally) has the power to connect you to others in this way. In these kinds of relationships, service and leadership feel natural and often come intuitively.
So instead of, like normal, thinking about how your music can compete or measure up, ask yourself those questions above. Though there’s more to developing an uplifting and impactful composing career, these questions will start you down the right path.
Recently, in the New Year Composition Jumpstart and on Facebook, I made the assertion that “J.S. Bach is a supreme composer but a *terrible* model for other (esp. young) composers.” Specifically, I called him “the worst model for developing ideas.”
The comments have still been pouring in, though my favorite was the one that began simply, “Wrong.” So now that you (and that commenter) are totally scandalized, let me explain why I say that.
Namely, let me explain the three specific situations I have in mind that too often make Bach a dangerous model.
Bach’s Excellence — and Dangerousness
Studying Bach’s music is like using a good set of kitchen knives.
To be clear, Bach is a composer who has peers but no superiors. (I would further argue that Bach’s circle of peers is wider than many people admit, because of hero-worship, racism, and ignorance — but that’s another blog post.) Bach’s level of excellence is beyond question. There is not a musician alive who has nothing to learn from Bach’s music.
Yet, the inarguable excellence of Bach’s music doesn’t automatically make it a good model.
There are many styles of music for which Bach is only tangentially relevant. If you wanted to write EDM, for instance, you would learn a lot more, and much more quickly, if you were to study the music of Kaskade or Avicii.
But the stylistic relevance of Bach’s music (or lack thereof) isn’t what makes it a potentially “dangerous” model.
Studying Bach’s music is like using a good set of kitchen knives. It’s really useful if you know what to handle it (pun intended), but it is just as easy to weaponize or mishandle and thereby lose a finger — or worse.
The danger is three-fold, and these dangers feed directly into one another:
Using the wrong tools to understand Bach’s music
Using it as a starting point
Holding it up as model for what your music should be
Using the Wrong Tools
In 2021, most students of Bach will analyze his music using some mixture of motivic analysis, Roman numeral analysis, and whatever they gleaned from their one semester of 18th-century counterpoint. They might have had one semester of Schenkerian analysis thrown in there, too.
But that’s it, because the vast majority of musicians who study Bach are not music theory or composition PhDs. In the previous paragraph, I’m already being generous with the analytical tools most musicians know, because most musicians — I’m including everyone, pro and amateur, regardless of style — did not complete an undergraduate composition degree.
Using the standard undergraduate tools to analyze Bach is like using the service manual of a 1920s Ford Model T to repair a 2021 Ford Mustang.
But let’s be generous for a moment and assume a musician wants to compose and has the training I identified in the first paragraph under this heading.
The danger of analyzing Bach with this training — which, to be clear, does hit a baseline of “good” and “industry-standard” — is that it still leaves massive gaps and misunderstandings.
To name only one, according to C.P.E. Bach, J.S. Bach “did not really buy ‘this inversion business,’” in the words of Robert Gjerdingen.
“If you’re writing in the style of Bach,” Gjerdingen explains, “you can’t throw in any inversion of a chord in a particular instance. It’s usually a very particular version of the chord, so, from Bach’s point of view, those were different things because they were used differently.”
Ultimately, using the standard undergraduate tools to analyze Bach is like using the service manual of a 1920s Ford Model T to repair a 2021 Ford Mustang.
Sure, there are some major similarities (“4 wheels!” “Headlights!”), but you’ll be missing a lot of key details and concepts to understand what’s going on in the late model Ford.
In contrast, if you approach Bach from an historical theoretical/compositional perspective, his music makes a lot more sense.
Over the past two decades especially, scholars such as Derek Remeš, Peter Schubert, Kevin Korsyn, and Robert Gjerdingen, among others, have done much to elucidate, “This is how Bach and his contemporaries actually thought about and taught music composition — and this is what 21st-century musicians can do with that understanding.”
Using Bach as a Starting Point
Although using period-appropriate tools to analyze and imitate Bach throws much more light onto his music than the standard university curriculum, Bach can still be a poor model to use as a starting point.
Others have interesting things to say about with which historical models they choose to start teaching and why (see Peter Schubert talking about teaching fugue), but what I had in mind specifically yesterday was Bach’s approach to developing ideas.
Bach uses a number of tools to develop his motivic ideas. These tools are almost universally useful for any composer. These includetransposition, inversion, retrograde, extension/fragmentation, rhythmic augmentation/diminution, interval expansion/contraction, etc. You see these basic tools used all the time, even by composers who don’t know their names.
As useful as these tools are, Bach’s deployment of them is what can make his music a poor model.
Unlike most music, Bach’s music is SATURATED with development. (See, for instance, David Bennett Thomas’s analysis of Bach’s first invention.)
Historically, this development strategy has been called “organicism”: every musical gesture grows out of a “single seed.” In the recent Jumpstart, to challenge its knee-jerk desirability, I less charitably called it Bach’s “backwater relationship” strategy: i.e., "Everyone is related to everyone else."
That saturation is what makes it a terrible model for young composers: first, because they're not capable of that level of integration. It takes serious contrapuntal chops to integrate motives that tightly. One semester of counterpoint usually doesn’t cut it — and most composers don’t have even that training.
Second, it’s much easier to get to that level of contrapuntal fluency (a) using the historical methods Schubert, Gjerdingen, and others have outlined and (b) using less sophisticated composers as one’s initial models.
The alternative (using Bach as one’s primary model for learning counterpoint) is like jumping from middle-school algebra directly to linear algebra. Sure, you can do it. Kind of. But not without a lot of unnecessary struggle and heartache.
Holding the Model as an Ideal
Bach-level motivic saturation can also be a terrible model because it too often gives composers the wrong idea.
The level of motivic integration one sees in Bach, Brahms, Bartók, or Berg — although an impressive and totally valid aesthetic — is not at all required to write exceptional, well-crafted, breathtaking, or goosebump-inducing music.
Debussy did not write using Bach’s kind of tight motivic integration.
Debussy’s music doesn’t work that way. Nor does Josquin’s (the “master of the notes, which must do as he wishes”). Nor does John Williams’s or Stevie Wonder’s or any number of other world-class composers.
The combination of having (charitably) insufficient technical training and assuming that “all great music works like this” leads to statements like “Bach is a genius. Us lowly common folk could never write anything like that.”
Yes, I am taking aim at a misconception many professionals understand. But how often, fellow professionals, do you explicitly tell this to your students? If you are the exception, I congratulate you — but how often do your peers say it?
Furthermore, fellow professionals, how often do you throw shade at Bach’s own models, such as Vivaldi and Telemann?
Most of all, how often do you look at Bach and say, “I could never do anything like that”?
That last statement is, to be blunt, complete nonsense.
It has NEVER been easier to write like Bach, because Bach already did it. Sure, it might take you the better part of a decade to master all the intricacies of his idiom, but you can do it. You’re not reinventing the wheel.
Even if you don’t want to sound exactly like Bach, there are plenty of composers alive today who have Bach’s level of compositional technique. Thomas Adès is one such composer, but I am positive there are dozens if not a few hundred others.
It’s a niche goal, but it’s not exclusively for geniuses or superhumans. As J.D. Roth puts it, you can’t have everything you want in this world, but you can have anything you want. Bach-level compositional technique 100% falls into that latter category.
Takeaway
The point of all this is that, while Bach’s music makes a valid aspiration, it can be a dangerous starting point.
The danger of using Bach’s music as a model is that, past a certain point, if analyzed with the wrong tools, it can be incomprehensible how he created it.
This incomprehensibility in turn can lead to a number of harmful assumptions and consequences:
That Bach is some unattainable kind of genius
That the level of motivic integration in Bach is some kind of ideal
That composers who don’t match that ideal aren’t “as good as” Bach
That “I” (random composer) “am not as good as Bach — and never will be”
That the attendant shame of the preceding assumptions hangs as an unavoidable yet unacknowledged cloud that continually rains down self-judgment, perfectionism, and imposter syndrome.
Spelled out in black and white, these thoughts are obviously toxic. But, unless they’re lying to themselves, anyone who has even been around composers knows that most of them carry some version of these assumptions and consequences.
It is the fortunate few who have escaped that cloud of toxicity. If that's you, again, I’m genuinely happy for you.
If it’s not — if you’re like most of us and live under that cloud of anxiety — know that composing doesn’t have to be that way.
It is my goal as a teacher of composition to ensure that no one has to suffer through those problems:
That they can own their voice.
That they can master the kinds of technique necessary to share their artistic vision — whether or not it looks like Bach’s.
That they can wield this technique in a creative process that feels fun, easeful, and full of energy.
That through their technical and process tools, they can create music that gets stuck in people’s ears, gives them goosebumps, takes their breath away, and holds them riveted to their seats.
That through this music, they can foster deep, healthy, and fulfilling connections among their collaborators, their audiences, and themselves.
That is the aim of my blog posts, my social media content, and the whole Wizarding School for Composers — and what I consider to be a heathy, uplifting, and realistic aspiration for any composer to pursue.
Classical composers were able to write the intricate musicat the speed they did because they were not trained the same way musicians are in modern universities.
Rather than teaching them theories about music, the conservatory system taught them to spot and elaborate hundreds of basic harmonic and contrapuntal patterns from single melodies or bass lines.
As composers became fluent in reproducing these patterns, they gained complete contrapuntal mastery.
This book rocked my world.
I feel safe in calling it not only my “Book of the Year,” but my “Book of the Decade.”
This is the book I wish I had when I was 15, just starting out as a composer, and it was just as meaningful to me as a professional composer with a PhD.
Why? Because it lines up with how teenage Joseph understood music — and how I think most people hear music — as a bunch of ear worms.
I want to find songs I love. I want to play those songs on repeat. I want to sing them constantly to myself. I want to be a collector of “favorite moments” in songs, the ones you rewind and playback over and over.
In other words, I am smitten with music. I want to know all the intimate details of the music I love, just like a lover seek to know everything about their beloved.
I suspect that most people who truly love music feel the same way — and that’s the genius of the pattern-based approach to learning harmony and counterpoint:
Rather than using this infatuation merely as motivation for students to learn music, it is the very mechanism by which it teaches music. The pattern-based approach makes your love of music thorough, disciplined, and intimate.
Now, I had learned most of these things by the time Child Composers came out (especially from Gjerdingen's previous book, Music in the Galant Style), but Child Composers put all of the details I had learned into context and added mountains of new, fascinating insights.
Remember when the extended editions of the Lord of the Rings films came out and people went nuts over them? That's how I feel about this book. It's gold upon gold.
So if you are a composer whose music relies on harmony and counterpoint, read this book. You’ll love it.
If you’re a performer who wants to demystify what composers do, read this book. It will show you.
Even if you’re just a music lover who wants to understandhow classical composers got their skills, this is the book for you. Gjerdingen supplements the book with comprehensive YouTube examples, so not reading music needn’t hold you back.
Furthermore (and I say this from my decade-plus work as an editor), Gjerdingen is an exceptional writer. His prose is charming, fluid, and easy to read. If you enjoy reading authors like David McCullough or Malcolm Gladwell, you’ll feel right at home with Gjerdingen.
I could go on and on about this book.
In the next round of the Wizarding School for Composers, I’ll be incorporating its ideas thoroughly into the curriculum.
But in the mean time, if you get the book, let me know what you think!
As both a lyricist and and composer, Sondheim was one of those rare artists whose craft and intellectual rigor were just as profound as his psychological insight and humanity.
My favorite song of his is probably “Send in the Clowns” (Barbra Streisand’s version is fantastic), but “Being Alive” is a close second.
Another connection I feel to Sondheim is that, teacher-wise, he would be my “compositional uncle” — both he and my Brandeis dissertation co-advisor David Rakowski studied with the American serialist icon Milton Babbitt. (Fun fact: Babbitt loved musicals and even started writing one.)
So it made me happy to see this tribute article from David Pogue the other day, “Lessons from Stephen Sondheim, the teacher”:
Stephen Sondheim may have been best known as one of the greatest composer/lyricists the theater has ever known. But he often said that he would have loved to have been a teacher — and he was an extraordinarily generous one to generations of young composers.
I was one of them. . . .
Pogue then elaborates on three key lessons he learned from Sondheim:
Content dictates form
It’s always worth the time to make your rhymes perfect
Live the adage, “Be willing to kill your darlings”
Don't let its title or source put you off. It has EVERYTHING to do with the creative process.
As composers, we reach a point when our teachers, mentors, and theory knowledge become less useful. Not because they have nothing more to teach us, but because the creative problems you face are YOUR problems.
Others may have solved aspects of them, but no one has solved the specific combination you have (often hazily) in mind.
Yes, that can make you feel stupid.
But knowing that no one but you has these creative answers can be liberating.
"It allows us,” Schwartz says, “to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time.
“No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right.
“No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but [we need to recognize that we are making] a very big transition:
“From learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries."
Last week, I wrote about the two fluencies that professional composers must have: technique and process.
Professional composers generally all achieve a baseline of technical fluency. Many, especially those in media music, also develop a reliable process fluency.
Without both fluencies, you can’t be like Michael Giacchino, for instance, and take on a project like Rogue One last minute — with only 4½ weeks to score and record it — and then complete it while still working steady hours of 9 AM-6 PM.
Sounds like an valuable skill, right?
Surprisingly, many professional composers — particularly those writing concert music — never develop such a reliable process:
They put off getting started, then struggle to get and stay inspired.
They foreground their insecurities and rarely accept anything as “good enough.”
They consequently blow past deadlines like weeds along a freeway median.
I will refrain from naming professional composers who’ve done this with commissions from world-class orchestras. We’ve all heard the gossip — and, at some time or another, we’ve all been there.
But we can refuse to stay there.
A Professional Creative Process
So what does a professional-level compositional process look like?
It has six key elements, or “workspaces”:
Consulting
Connecting
Sketching
Assembling
Revising
Shipping
These workspaces are NOT a series of steps, nor typically are they discrete, physical locations. Rather, they reflect different ways of thinking about, relating to, or interacting with our music and our collaborators.
Let’s examine each of these elements in turn . . .
Consulting
This workspace is where you determine your patrons’, employers’, and collaborators’ needs. Often the starting and ending point of the creative process, it shows up in the middle not infrequently, too.
This is where you ask questions to hear and internalize your collaborators’ needs and desires, where you brainstorm together to develop ideas, and where you go to enrich your own ideas with other perspectives.
You can visualize this workspace as a big conference room table (with donuts or other snacks!), a set of comfortable couches, or even the booth at your favorite restaurant or bar — anywhere you can picture yourself sitting, talking, and hanging with your collaborators.
Connecting
“Connecting” is where you cultivate inspiration actively rather than waiting for it to “just happen.” This workspace is what many composers call “pre-composition” (though, like all six workspaces, it is used throughout the creative process).
My favorite way to visualize this space is as a big “conspiracy wall.”
Your job here is to make meaning — to identify why you care about what you’re writing:
How does this current project relate to your past ones?
What specifically influences this current project?
A treasured memory? A recent experience you just had?
A TV show you were just watching?
A line from a book you just read?
Certain passages or whole pieces of music?
What kinds of connections might others make to what you are creating?
The ideas you generate here all count. They’re all valuable even if they never show up in the final piece.
The goal here is to make it easy and inevitable for you to write music, because you have developed something to say.
Sketching
Sketching is the sandbox of the creative process. It’s play time. It’s magic markers and play dough and make believe.
This workspace is where the rubber hits the road: namely, where you convert your inspiration into pitches and rhythms (notated or recorded).
The goal of sketching depends on where you are in writing your piece:
“Assembling” requires ideas to arrange. Sketching creates those ideas.
“Revising” needs alternatives to composed phrases. Sketching creates those alternatives.
By definition, every idea here is half-baked and incomplete because they are all at the service of assembling and revising. This recognition can free you from the tyranny of perfectionism.
Assembling
Assembling is the workbench of the creative process. It reflects the literal definition of the word compose: namely, to put together. It’s where you organize and assemble your sketches into complete phrases, phrase groups, and sections.
Composing complete phrases is essential to working happily and effectively in the “Assembling” workspace. Because phrases are the shortest unit of a complete musical thought, if you fixate on shorter or longer timescales, you will struggle to get a firm grasp on just what your musical thoughts are.
This focus on phrases and sections also helps you escape the “left to right” mindset. Because the Assembling workspace results in complete musical thoughts, you can shuffle around and develop these thoughts without having to peg them to a certain place on the timeline.
Now, what counts as a complete phrase varies by composer and project. Sometimes, and for some people, this includes the full orchestration. For others, the arrangement and production are tasks part of the “Revising” workspace.
What matters in this workspace is that you include all the details necessary to capture your complete musical thought, phrase by phrase.
Revising
Revising is like staining, decorating, and sealing a piece of woodworking. This is where you deepen connections between phrases, remove excess details, and polish the remaining ones.
This workspace is often where craft takes over from creativity.
This workspace is often analytical. Its goal isn’t to render a judgment on artistic worthiness but to exercise discernment. Here you ask questions like:
How well does this passage capture my inspiration?
Is it clear that I want this passage to be the focal point and not that one?
What technical tools can I use to enhance these relationships?
Somewhat paradoxically, by focusing the mind on specific details, this revising workspace liberates the unconscious (or the muse, whatever you want to call it) to speak more clearly by harnessing a tool called mental simulation.
Shipping
Shipping is the mundane bit: the concession that “my musicians want sheet music to play from” or “the sound editor needs stems he can create the show’s final mix with.”
This grunt work includes work like tidying the notation, proofreading the score, making parts, or mixing and mastering your track.
In early stages of a professional career, composers often have to do these things themselves, but as they become more established, shrewd (and otherwise busy) composers outsource these tasks to other people.
Between managing outsourced tasks and confirming deliverables, work in this space often happens in tandem with Consulting.
These Workspaces Are NOT a Timeline
If you are a professional composer or have been working to become one, all these workspaces will sound familiar to you.
However, one of the biggest mistakes people make when conceptualizing the creative process is imagining it as a linear process through time.
The professional creative process I describe is best understood spatially.
Your creative process is NOT a specific ordering of these workstations. It is not a series of “stages” or a timeline. Rather, it is the ever-changing paths you trace between them.
Thinking in these terms helps you avoid getting fazed whenever the path of writing “this piece” looks different than the way you wrote “the last one.”
Indeed, that path inevitably varies from project to project:
Sometimes it looks like, “Sketch → Assemble → Connect → Consult → Revise → Connect → Revise→ Ship.”
Or it can look like, “Consult → Connect → Sketch → Assemble → Connect → Sketch → Revise → Ship.”
Or any of an endless number of permutations.
For some projects, you might even hardly use some of the workstations.
Likewise, the time you spend in each workstation is typically not measured in days or weeks. Usually, in any single workspace composers spend at most a few hours, but often as little as a few minutes.
This frequent turnover happens because these workspaces describe the nature of what you’re doing, not an overall roadmap.
Again, thinking in terms of workspaces can lessen your anxiety, because the answer to “Where should I be right now?” isn’t a pre-determined checklist.
Instead, it is the encouraging assurance, “You only ‘need’ to be in whatever workstation would best help you advance the project and maintain your energy and enthusiasm.”
Why You Need a Professional-Level Creative Process
The primary challenges that technically proficient composers face are process issues.
These process issues usually do not signal technical deficiencies. They are also not artistic indictments or moral failings.
And, most of the time, they are not cause for existential meltdowns. (As a professional, you will have those occasionally because you’re human, NOT regularly because you are a composer.)
A professional creative process collects the rain of your inspiration into a river of steady output. Like good floodplain management, it mitigates creative emergencies:
It gives you tried and tried practices and frameworks so you can navigate everyday creative questions with hardly a second thought.
It prevents major creative issues from happening frequently.
When major issues do happen, it ensures that you can get through them with minimal anxiety.
The creative process model I describe above does all this. This is why, when describing the Four Elements of Compositional Magic, I call it Flow and associate it with water.
In future posts, I will show how this Flow magic (water) works together with World Building (earth), Sleight of Hand (air), and Inspiration (fire) to help you reliably create musical magic.
All composers began as amateurs. You wrote music, with no or minimal training, because you loved it.
Sure, being an amateur had its frustrations. It often took you a forever of fumbling to find the figures you imagined.
But that earnest stumbling was part of the fun. In the end, simply hearing your music and thinking, “I made this!” was enough to offset the honest truth: “This doesn’t really sound like the music I idolize.”
Until it wasn’t.
The First Fluency: Technique
At some point, noticing that gap began to really grate on you — so you studied:
You improved your ears — and became faster at capturing the sounds you imagined.
You attuned your ears — and became adept at perceiving fine distinctions between sounds.
You broadened your ears — and started noticing a wider range of musical sounds.
At first, these skills felt like water in a desert.
But as they began to take root in you, composing increasingly felt like climbing up a mountain of sand.
What gives? Here’s the secret:
If writing music were always like taking dictation, then composers would only need to develop well-trained ears.
Sometimes composing is just like that — but that’s often not the case.
Often, composers don’t actually know what pitches or rhythms they want. They may have a hunch, but no clear sonic picture. Or, they hear one dimension of the music well, but the other dimensions are all hazy.
In fact, if we’re being honest, composers regularly sit down with no ideas or feelings about what to write. On any given Tuesday morning, their aural imagination is a completely blank page.
And here you began to despair:
“What happened to the easiness?!” you ask — forgetting that you never were able to capture the sound of your musical idols.
“What happened to the joy! What happened to the fun!” you say — more reasonably, because composing did used to be those things.
The Second Fluency: Process
What happened was that you developed technical fluency without simultaneously developing process fluency.
Technical fluency means being able to capture what you hear using a DAW, notation, or both.
Process fluency means being able to develop your musical thoughts from initial inspiration to the completed piece.
Though these two fluencies rely on each other, they cannot take each other’s place:
Technical fluency ensures you have a vocabulary — but not that you have something to say.
Process fluency ensures you have something to say — but not the vocabulary with which to express it.
As an amateur, your processes were sufficient for your vocabulary. If you were like most composers, that process was some version of “fumble eagerly like a puppy through taking dictation from left to right.”
As you gained technical fluency on a professional level, you also needed to develop professional-level processes.
Professional composers do sometimes take left-to-right dictations from their aural imagination. But they also have reliable processes in place for when they know only some or even none of the details.
So what does a professional-level compositional process look like? It has six key elements:
Consulting tools that get you out of your head, help you internalize your collaborators’ needs and desires, and enrich your own ideas with other perspectives.
Brainstorming tools that enable you to cultivate inspiration actively rather than waiting for it to “just happen.”
Sketching tools that free you from the tyranny of perfectionism and “It has to come all at once.”
Composing tools that show how to assemble your sketches in multiple ways besides “left to right.”
Revising tools that give you constructive feedback rather than a general “This isn’t any good!”
Shipping tools that make proofreading/parts-creation or mixing/mastering a breeze.
This workspace is where you determine your patrons’, employers’, and collaborators’ needs. Often the starting and ending point of the creative process, it shows up in the middle not infrequently, too.
“Connecting” is where you cultivate inspiration actively rather than waiting for it to “just happen.”
Sketching is the sandbox of the creative process. It’s play time. It’s magic markers and play dough and make believe.
Assembling is the workbench of the creative process. It reflects the literal definition of the word compose: namely, to put together. It’s where you organize and assemble your sketches into complete phrases, phrase groups, and sections.
Revising is like staining, decorating, and sealing a piece of woodworking. This is where you deepen connections between phrases, remove excess details, and polish the remaining ones.
Shipping is the mundane bit: the concession that “my musicians want sheet music to play from” or “the sound editor needs stems he can create the show’s final mix with.”
