Category: Composing

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Have You Fallen into the “Technique Trap”?

As musicians, we learn a lot of technique in school. It’s what we’re graded on. It’s often what we value in others or ourselves. It can be easy to think that technique is the be-all, end-all.

At the very least, focusing on technique feels comfortable. It’s what we’re used to. It feels like something we can control.

But once we graduate to larger world—unless we’re one of the few who land the full-time orchestral gig or university teaching job—the reality is starkly different.

Professional careers require more than flawless technique. These demands can feel daunting to even the most talented and proficient musician:

  • How to find gigs and secure commissions
  • How to cultivate an audience for our work
  • How to create and execute projects that fulfill our artistic dreams and impact out communities
  • How to negotiate money and contract issues
  • . . . and on and on

These are difficult problems. 

Because of our training, our first instinct is often, “Let me throw more technique at these problems. That will get me the success I want!”

Yet—hopefully sooner rather than later—we discover that, for these questions, technique is often a cop out:

  • An excuse not to show up by saying “I’m not ready.”
  • A defensive reaction when the audiences we inherit aren’t interested in our work: “They just don’t know quality when they hear it.”
  • A hurdle that maintains gatekeepers’ power by encouraging us to say, “I must not be good enough yet.”

Insecurity, cynicism, powerlessness—these are some heavy feelings.

But they are not the truth of your career or potential.

Your career is not constrained because you lack the technical mastery of Yo-Yo Ma or Augusta Read Thomas.

You can create the artistically fulfilling, socially satisfying, and financially rewarding career of your dreams—if you widen the scope of your artistic possibilities past technique.

The image that started this post comes from the harmony assignments that Leonard Bernstein wrote while a student at Harvard . . .

He got a C-. But I don’t have to tell you who Leonard Bernstein is or what he did.

Just like Lenny, there’s more to your career than how good certain gatekeepers say your technique is—even if your technique has room for growth.

So if technique is only part, what does a complete musician look like?

The answer is what I call your Artistic Voice.

And I’ll be sharing more about it in the coming weeks . . .

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Kitten hiding

Are You Hiding Beneath “Better”?

Some musicians constantly buy new gear, because they think it’ll make them a better musician.

Others constantly try to develop new skills, because they think theirs are not good enough.

And it’s true. Yours could probably use some growth.

Yet new gear and improved skills are just a security blanket.

Every day—

  • Someone who orchestrates worse than you gets commissioned to write an orchestra piece
  • Someone who’s worse at MIDI programming gets hired to do the TV show.
  • Someone who is worse at melody writing gets their show on Broadway.
  • Somebody worse at teaching or research gets academic tenure.
  • Someone whose music is “less imaginative” than yours wins the grant
  • Someone who is worse at web design converts more score sales from their website than you do.

You, too, don’t need to collect all the gear or master all the skills before you are worthy enough, talented enough, or smart enough to make a difference in the world.

Even without you learning anything more, your music is already valuable to someone.

Stop hiding.

Find that someone.

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Cooking deep dish pizza

How Learning To Cook Is Like Composing Music

I love to cook. My favorite part is chopping vegetables and inhaling their aroma as they sauté on the stove.

When I was younger, and when I want to try something new, I would follow recipes.

Often, though, I simply mix together and season what I have on hand.

I can do this because I’ve been cooking for more than a decade. So I know—

  • What the various ingredients taste like.
  • How to cook them using different methods.
  • How their flavors combine together.

Now I’m no expert chef or even some Andrew Rea-level home chef (though I’ll gladly binge with Babish any day).

But I have developed a baseline level of discernment: the capacity to judge well in the absence of a recipe, formula, or rubric.

Developing discernment is one of the highest aspirations for chefs.

Discernment liberates your imagination. It helps you know in your gut what will be the effect of your instinctive actions. It frees you to create in moment and instills a quiet, playful confidence.

For those same reasons, it’s also one of the highest aspirations for composers.

But composers often have to develop this discernment despite the theory and composition training they’ve received. Traditional composition pedagogy is filled with superstitions (see my mentor David Rakowski’s catalog of buttstix).

Imagine, if when you were learning how to cook, you had peers and mentors insisting on things like:

  • “Your recipe can’t be any good because it has tomatoes in it. Tomatoes are so cliché.”
  • “Your recipe is too similar to others to be any good.”
  • “You’re not a real chef until you put your own spin on broiling.”
  • “Your food doesn’t count because you made it in your home for yourself rather than at a fancy restaurant for paying customers.”

Such superstitions about cooking ingredients and methods rightly seem stupid.

Superstitions are the opposite of discernment.

But in music, suckers fall for that drivel all. the. time.

I would know. As a composer, I fell hard for it for almost a decade.

This is why I created the Wizarding School for Composers—to help other composers and aspiring composers develop real discernment.

With that discernment, my students work with greater fluency and joy all while having greater clarity on what actually moves the needle in making their music vivid, sophisticated, and magical.

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crumpled paper

Have You Ever Had “Right Note” Syndrome?

As composers, we all know that ideas, technique, and process are inseparable:

  • Ideas are the specific musical gestures we imagine.
  • Technique is what we have internalized—physically, aurally, and theoretically—about music in general.
  • Process is how we use that technique to bring our ideas to life.

When these three align, composing is a joy.

When they’re not, it sucks. And, stuck, you struggle to string one note after the last.

That “what comes next?” frustration is the worst.

It makes you feel stupid and stressed.

You begin to think that you’ve forgotten how to compose—and, sometimes, wonder if you ever knew how to compose to begin with.

There are many ways out of this writer’s block, but which exit strategy to choose depends on which creative ditch—or, in other words, which maladaptive creative process—you’ve fallen into.

One such maladaptive strategy is the “right note” syndrome.

It happens whenever there’s a gap between what you hear in your head and what you comprehend about it.

Because of that gap, you can begin to obsess over a particular note, chord, or rhythm. You will play or listen to it over and over again, trying but never able to get it “right.”

This process is maladaptive because it doubles down on the idea/technique/process imbalance rather than relieving it.

The basic cause of “right note syndrome” is that you are applying your technique too narrowly.

The most important unit of music is the phrase, not any note-level event. When you fixate on details, you lose sight of both the technical and artistic contexts that could validate your choices.

The cure is, first, to refocus your attention on the phrase itself—not its details:

  • What is this phrase doing?
  • What is its mood?
  • How does the detail in question fit into the bigger picture of this phrase? Of the larger phrase group?

These questions will naturally inspire others about your artistic inspiration, too:

  • What is this phrase expressing?
  • What about that feeling, image, or idea must the music capture in this phrase? What can be given to a different phrase?
  • How does this phrase fit into the bigger picture of your influences and ideas?

Often, these questions are sufficient to get you unstuck.

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Why Should Anyone Care about Tonality?

Tonality is a musicological debate about style disguised as a theoretical debate about pitch organization.

Whether it's Schenker's arrogant, narrow nationalism or Tymoczko's generous, imaginative catholicism, the debate around what defines “tonality” is, at its core, a question of repertoire.

No one would argue that the music of Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms is not tonal. But what about William Byrd? Or Bull? Or, to go the other direction, Barber? Or Britten? To say nothing of Charlie Byrd or the Beatles?

Whether the music of these latter figures is tonal depends on who you ask. But whether it exhibits pitch organization is indisputable.

Hence, tonality is fundamentally a question about style, not pitch organization.

Style is a red herring for composers

Learning to distinguish “tonal” from “atonal,” “post-tonal,” “pre-tonal,” or “extended tonal” music carries about the same relevance as distinguishing between sub-genres of death metal. It’s not useless—but it doesn't describe really how the music works. It mostly just identifies its stylistic markers.

In other words, “tonality” is an elaborately justified label.

For composers who want to know how music works, such stylistic labels are a red herring. Style can tell you what combination of features will produce a particular “sound,” but they don’t actually show you how it works. As Charles Ives quipped, “What has sound got to do with music?”

Milton Babbitt affirmed Ives’s quip when he asserted, “Nothing gets old faster than a new sound.”

Lest you think this bias against “sound” is some avant-garde fetish: First, remember how much avant-garde composers focused on sonic innovation. Second, put Babbitt’s words in the mouth of any pop music agent or producer, and you’ll notice that they fit right at home there, too.

Old cell phones have a lot to say about how valuable your “new sounds” are. (Credit: flickr.com/photos/vaguelyartistic/)

Like cars and smartphones, the value of unique “sounds” quickly depreciates.

Style tells you little about musical excellence. Instead, it is a proxy for cultural power and relevance. Again, this is not a useless consideration—but it is, at best, tangential to the question of pitch organization.

Musicians can organize pitch in a lot of ways

In truth, “tonality” comprises a detailed collection of pitch strategies that musicians have used in various combinations and emphases. Many of these strategies carry over into music that exists at the edges or beyond the boundaries of what scholars consider “tonal.”

Among other concepts and approaches, they include assumptions about

  • octave equivalence
  • tuning and enharmonic equivalence
  • structural hierarchies
  • distinctions between consonance and dissonance
  • the qualities, spellings, and inversions of different intervals and chords
  • the functional equivalence of chord inversions
  • harmonic consistency
  • harmonic syntax via scale-degree function or hypermetrical placement
  • harmonic and voice-leading schemata
  • the usage of different scales
  • the prevalence of stepwise motion generally in melodic lines and strongly in harmonic voice leading
  • melodic shape via step progressions, rhythmic permutations, or hypermetrical placement
  • melodic structure via rhythmic motives, pitch motives, and pitch contours
  • the harmonic implications of all melodic lines
  • the functional distinction between the bass line and upper voices
  • degrees of formal articulation indicated by coordinated of harmonic and melodic gestures (i.e., cadences and pitch centricity)

Despite being almost 20 items long, this list is hardly an exhaustive catalog of pitch organization concepts and approaches. What distinguishes different styles is how they remix these principles.

Some pieces use many of these strategies. Others use only a subset of them. Still other pieces use different pitch strategies entirely.

Though many pieces contain all of these strategies, no single piece can be said to exemplify all of them.

Focus on the effect and interaction of choices, not their labels: What does Debussy’s music do to create its unique states of being?

Focus on the effect, not the label

Furthermore, none of these strategies or their applications is intrinsically “excellent” or “superior.” But noticing them allows musicians to hone their discernment about how specific pieces create the musical effects they do.

For instance:

  • How can Debussy get away with writing parallel fifths?
  • How does Beethoven write an hour-long symphony that isn’t boring?
  • How does Rachel Portman write an hour-long soundtrack that isn’t boring?
  • Why does Byrd’s counterpoint feel different than Bach’s and different again from Bartók’s?
  • How does Mahler give you goosebumps?
  • How does John Coltrane create the luminous sheen in his solos?

These questions do tell you something about style—but when you go beyond merely labeling these features to describing their relationships to key moments in a specific piece, that’s when you really start to understand how music works.

That’s when you can discern not just why Debussy’s style is different than Clara Schumann’s (for instance), but what the music is doing to create its unique states of being.

Thus, the most pertinent analytical question for composers is not “What style is this piece and why?” or even “What specific choices did x composer make?” but “What is the effect of these choices?”

P.S.—If you want to dig further into these questions, here are some key books to check out: Gjerdingen, Harrison, Huron, Straus, Tagg, Tymoczko.

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Why, yes, even today I can write!

As I explained in my last post, when you say “I can’t write music today,” you’re probably not referring to an ability, but to an outcome or aspiration.

And you’re probably correct. As BJ Fogg explains, “you can only achieve aspirations and outcomes over time if you execute the right specific behaviors.”

So, you probably can’t compose today if by “compose” you mean something like:

  • “Write impressive, innovative music like taking dictation.”
  • Or “Wait to get started until I have the right ideas.”
  • Or “Complete and polish an entire passage—not just a few bars, let alone only one aspect of it.”

On most days, such aspirations are totally unrealistic even if your name is Miles Davis or Augusta Read Thomas.

This is why the key tool I teach in the Wizarding School for Composers is “Shrink the Frame.”

As a baseline, “Shrink the Frame” means

“Give yourself tasks you actually have a hope of accomplishing.”

More optimistically, it means

“Break composing down into tasks that are short, clear, and even fun.”

Or, in other words,

“Identify, practice, and celebrate the behaviors that lead to your desired outcomes and aspirations.”

But what would that look like on any given Tuesday? And how could it possibly help you achieve even your highest artistic aspirations?

Mountain Base Camp. (Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mountain_base_camp.jpg)

How Do You Climb a Mountain?

Imagine yourself about to climb a mountain. (I’m sure composing has felt like this for you at some point.)

Picture yourself standing there at the base, needing to figure out the fastest way up.

The first, tempting idea is to scramble straight up the face of the mountain. . . .

Anyone who’s hiked a mountain knows this is a dumb idea. You’d be exhausted before you made it even a third of the way up.

Instead, you look around for the trail and notice it consists of switchbacks, all the way up. Sure, this will still take effort. (After all, it’s still a mountain.) But you know you will have the energy and inspiration to keep going if you take this route instead.

So, wisely, you decide to take the switchback route.

Scrambling up the Mountain

The Scramble

Too often, that same wisdom does not carry over into composing.

At the start of each new piece, we typically catch some vision of what the completed work could be. That initial inspiration could be:

  • A song, piece, poem, novel, TV show, film, ballet, etc.
  • A story, experience, relationship, or memory
  • A musical fragment or something nonmusical
  • Even something as simple as a feeling or an intuition

Then, whatever the source, while that vision is still hazy but intoxicating, we attempt a mad scramble toward its summit.

This process hardly ever works. Its results are as predictable as they are unfortunate:

  • Your initial attempts do not get you anywhere close to completing the piece or capturing your vision.
  • Unable to move forward, your enthusiasm evaporates, and you end up in an emotional puddle.
  • You procrastinate until pressed against a hard deadline—then turn your life upside down as you rush to finish.
  • You learn to associate composing with anxiety, pressure, and massive expectations—making composing something you want to avoid.
  • You internalize the mantra “I work best under pressure,” though you secretly know this is just an excuse for your ineffective work habits.

Your ineffective work habits are not a moral failing. They are not a taint on your character.

But the truth is, you don’t work best under pressure. No one does.

There is a better way, and you can learn it.

Switchbacks: nurturing your inspiration and responding with music

The Switchbacks: Your Initial Musical Response

Let’s go back to the start. You’ve just caught some vision of what the completed work could be. How can “switchbacking” help you proceed with a sense of ease—and even fun?

Imagine the two sides of the switchback represent two broad categories of action:

  1. Nurturing your inspiration
  2. Responding with music

Casting aside debilitating stories about the creative process, you don’t fixate on one big (but hazy) inspiration and make one massive push to get there.

Instead, you

  1. Capture that initial inspiration in words, pictures, recordings, whatever.
  2. Create a small, initial musical response to your inspiration.

This response could entail you recording 3-5, minute-long improvisations. Or finding 12 chords that remind you of the inspiration. Or choosing which instruments would best capture its sound. etc.

Each one of these possible responses represent a single compositional task. You get credit for doing any and every one of them. All your work counts, even if it no one can see or hear it in the finished product.

First switchback

The Switchbacks: Nurturing Your Inspiration

There will come a point, however, when your initial inspiration runs out of steam.

This is not a threat.

You don’t need to fight it, flee it, or freeze (for instance, respectively: beat yourself up, go do the dishes/watch Netflix, or start taking quick, shallow breaths as you tighten all your muscles).

No, you are perfectly safe and just fine—you’ve simply come to the end of a switchback.

So now you simply need to start moving the other direction: use the music you’ve created to further nurture and refine your inspiration.

Go back to your notes or diagrams, and ask yourself:

  • Of the musical fragments I created, which best capture my initial inspiration? Why?
  • In what ways do these resonant fragments I created affirm my initial inspiration?
  • In what ways does it change or deepen that initial understanding?
  • How does it broaden that understanding? Of what other songs, poems, images, experiences, TV shows, sensations, relationships, etc. do these resonant fragments remind me?

Answering these questions will give you new musical ideas.

In turn, these new ideas will help you future refine and nurture your inspiration, which will lead to richer musical ideas . . .

And thus will the whole cycle continue. All the way up the mountain, you will keep switching back and forth between musical ideas and extramusical inspirations until, one day, you reach the summit.

Though the whole process can take days or even months, at no point is it onerous, because you always had one next, small step you could take.

Subsequent switchbacks

Go Try This at Home!

If you’ve been avoiding your work or if you’re an entrenched procrastinator, you might not believe me. So go try it.

  • If you’re stuck on a particular musical passage,
    • Pretend you are an audience member and interpret what you’ve written with your imaginative and associative mind.
    • Nurture your inspiration with the questions above and watch that process inspire new musical ideas.
  • And if have been sitting on an inspiration, but haven’t been sure how to express it, you’re in luck—because you’re about it have a ton of fun.
    • Choose a musical behavior you can do in 20 minutes and just. start. playing.
    • Use your inspiration as a prompt for that musical game—whether it’s writing variations on a melody, designing new sounds in your DAW, whatever.
    • At the end of 20 minutes, check back in with your inspiration, see what resonates, and keep refining.

On whichever side of the switchback you begin, continue the process of iterating both your inspirations and your musical responses.

Soon enough, you will find yourself on the top of your creative mountain, not only having a completed piece, but also having thoroughly enjoyed the hike.

As Hans Zimmer says,

“Writing music [can] be something you indulge in, like a delicious meal, an intimate conversation with your best friend or an endless day at the beach. Something you don’t want to hurry, something you don’t want to end.”

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Well, maybe I can write today…

Composing is not magic. It is a behavior.

More specifically, composing is a collection of actions and behaviors—improvising, sketching, notating, revising, etc.—that may lead to a deliverable outcome—a printed score, a live performance, a mastered track, etc.

Beneath these behaviors lie deeper motivations.

Some people compose to make money. Others compose to have fun. Or to secure tenure. Or to get into grad school. Or to see their name on a Hollywood movie poster. Or to fit in with their peers and mentors. Or to impress critics and gatekeepers. Or to make fans. . . .

Any number of these aspirations can sit behind why you compose—but they still aren’t your deepest reasons.

Behind these aspirations, what you really want is to feel economically secure. Or satisfy your thirst for learning. Or secure your belonging in a particular tribe. Or find love. Or use your musical excellence as a proxy for your personal worth. Or feel like your life matters to someone else. . . .

Put simply, you and I compose because we want to ensure our physical, emotional, social, and spiritual needs are met.

These intangible drives are the bedrock reasons people do anything. Their lack of fulfillment is what inspires worries, insecurities, self-doubt, and self-destructive behaviors.

Stop Making Composition Hard

Helping people find mature, healthy, and flexible answers to these ultimate concerns is for psychologists and spiritual advisors.

I am a creative coach, and as such, my job is to point out one simple truth:

You do NOT have to master your deepest motivations in order to compose.

And thank goodness for that. Self-knowledge is a lifelong pursuit. If it were a prerequisite to action, you would never be ready to do anything.

Moreover, you do NOT have to pursue some career or social strategy in order to compose.

Though such strategies are useful, no single compositional behavior can ever accomplish a career or social goal. In fact, most compositional actions you take have zero bearing on whether the Los Angeles Philharmonic commissions you or Princeton offers you tenure.

Most of all, you do NOT have to complete your printed score, master your track, etc. every time you sit down to compose.

Focus on Actions, not Outcomes and Aspirations

Indeed, it’s not possible to achieve deliverable outcomes every time you compose.

As behavioral scientist BJ Fogg explains, “A behavior is something you can do right now or at another specific point in time. You can turn off your phone. You can eat a carrot. You can open a textbook and read five pages.”

In compositional terms, you can improvise an 8-bar melody. You can notate that melody. You can write out three different harmonizations of it. You can draft two different arrangements of those 8 bars.

Any one of these tasks takes less than 20 minutes for even an intermediate-level composer (let alone a professional).

Fogg continues, “In contrast, you can’t achieve an aspiration or an outcome at any given moment. You cannot suddenly get better sleep. You cannot lose twelve pounds at dinner tonight.”

In other words, you cannot suddenly write better counterpoint. You cannot secure tenure in one morning’s composing session. You cannot gather a wide following with one email blast.

Most pertinently, for composers indoctrinated in Romantic/modernist notions of musical “excellence” (as we all are to some degree), you cannot write innovative music—or even simply deliverable music—without iterating your initial ideas.

Musical excellence is, at best, an outcome (Fogg: “[something] measurable, like getting straight As second semester”), but far more likely, it is an aspiration (“abstract desires, like wanting your kids to succeed in school”).

Excellence is NOT a compositional behavior. It is not something you can do “at any given moment.”

Laying on a bed of nails

This Is Why You Hurt Yourself

“You can only achieve aspirations and outcomes over time if you execute the right specific behaviors,” Fogg concludes.

These “right specific behaviors” do not depend on any aspirations and deliverable outcomes:

  • The deliverable outcome of compositional behaviors is not essential to doing those behaviors.
  • Achieving your career or social aspirations is not essential to doing compositional behaviors.
  • Fulfilling your psychological drives is not essential to doing compositional behaviors.

So, if you want to compose today, first, recognize that any compositional behavior you do is just one step toward your deliverable outcomes or aspirations.

Think of your compositional actions like a bed of nails and the composition process like laying on that bed.

When your pressure is spread across hundreds of nails, you can lay (relatively) comfortably without injuring yourself. But if you place all your pressure on one or two nails, you WILL hurt yourself.

Likewise, any given 20 minutes of composing cannot support the full weight of your artistic ambitions. If you try to force it, you will injure yourself emotionally.

We’ve all been there . . .

The Process Keeps You Safe

It was never the pressure you placed on yourself that took you from blank page to finished score, because that pressure represents an aspiration or a psychological drive.

Aspirations and drives are not behaviors. They are stories. They cannot do anything.

So, second, trust the process.

Most music you write will take at least 5 hours to complete. That time span represents at least 15 composing actions.

If you do even one composing action today, it will likely have dozens, if not thousands of fellows.

So just choose one and do it.

Every action you take will help you understand your piece better. The results of any single action need not be visible in the final product.

In time, all your little actions will add up. They always do.

“But,” you protest, “That’s not inspiring! Doing some arbitrary behavior feels pointless. How can I know which compositional behaviors I should do next?”

Stay tuned. That is the subject of my next post.

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Why, no, I cannot write today! I have no time, no motivation, no . . .

If you’re like me, your number one love is writing music—but your number one skill is avoiding writing music. Every day, we find some “good” reason to avoid writing:

  • I don’t have enough time
  • I don’t have the emotional energy for it
  • I don’t feel inspired
  • I don’t know how to write what comes next
  • I don’t know what comes next
  • I don’t have the performers or the commission

These excuses reveal what Steven Pressfield calls your “Resistance”—the shadow part of yourself that keeps you from working.

Why would your Resistance do this to you? Why would it keep you away from the thing you love? Because it’s trying to keep you safe.

Safe from what? Ironically, your own impossible expectations.

The Weight of Impossible Expectations

You see, any day you can speak is a day you can create music.

  • If you write down the first melody that comes to your head, you have composed.
  • If you spend 15 minutes tweaking 4 bars of music, you have composed
  • If you sit down with your instrument and improvise for 2 minutes, you have composed.
  • If you sing your musical imaginings to yourself in the shower or while driving, you have composed.

And though it’s true that some days we do need to step away from creating music, most days are not those days. Most days, you actually do have the time, energy, and even the desire to create in some small way.

But, too often, “some small way” is not how we imagine composing. Instead, we place impossible demands on it:

  • “I have to complete this all at once.”
  • “I have to do it right the first time.”
  • “My unpolished improvisations do not count as composing.”
  • “I need to map out the finished piece from the beginning and not deviate from my plan.”
  • “What I write has to capture my initial inspiration.”
  • “What I write has to live up to my artistic hopes.”
  • “What I write has to become popular, financially successful, critically acclaimed, or connoisseur-approved.”
  • “What I write has to be wholly original, ground-breaking, and boundary-pushing.”

Any one of these demands is a heavy burden—and they rarely come alone. Collectively, they are soul-crushing.

How Your Impossible Expectations Gaslight You

None of these Atlas-like expectations are good, healthy, or true. Yet they gaslight us into believing that we are the problem.

They make us believe that we must carry their burdens on our shoulders.

That unless we fulfill their demands, we are not real composers or good composers or successful composers.

That until we fulfill their demands, we are not yet good enough, not yet talented enough, not yet original enough, not yet disciplined enough, not yet famous enough, not yet respected enough, not yet anything enough to write music. 

Is it any wonder, then, that part of you is trying to keep you safe from these feelings?

Ironically, that drive to keep you safe from those expectations only reinforces their outcome: you avoid writing music.

Atlas holding the world

You and your impossible expectations (a selfie)

Truths to Hold On To

The first step, then, to composing today is accepting some uncomfortable truths—“uncomfortable” because the emotional abuse to which you’ve submitted under these expectations frightens you away from leaving them.

The foremost of these truths is as simple as it is powerful: 

Your music matters because you matter.

And the second is just as profound:

You may not yet be as good of a composer as you hope to be, but, chances are, you are probably already a better composer than you need to be.

From these mantras come a whole host of counter-expectations:

  • “I can complete this a little at a time—no effort is too small to count.”
  • “It only needs to be right at the end. Until then, I can revel in all the wrong roads and all the paths not taken.”
  • “My unpolished improvisations are like ungut gems—they are the source of my polished compositions and a step I cannot skip.”
  • “My understanding of the piece’s form and its extramusical associations will evolve as I write the piece.”
  • “My initial inspiration, by definition, cannot be my goal. I can honor it, even as my work inevitably develops that idea in different directions.”
  • “No single piece must or even can fulfill my artistic hopes.”

But how do you enact these expectations in real life? That is the subject of next week’s post.

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Some Thoughts on the Fourth Movement of Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto—or, How a Composer Analyzes Music, and Why

This is not so much an analysis as it is the sketch or the start of one. Its goal is understand the compositional possibilities this movement suggests to me on a particular Tuesday afternoon.

While composing my latest piece for Hub New Music (with generous funding by the Barlow Endowment), I began to think of a recent experience I had, and this memory triggered a strong emotional and musical response. After composing out a sketch of this idea, I noticed that what I wrote and was imagining reminded me of the fourth movement of Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto. I don’t want blatantly to copy the movement, but I thought it prudent and useful to see what Ligeti does in it.

Here, for your listening pleasure, is that movement:

General Observations

First, some general observations:

  1. A very fast surface rhythm prevails throughout, but because it’s not perfectly stable (having both linear and contrapuntal variations), the music does not sound metronomic.
  2. Most of the piece is very quiet. Ligeti uses loud dynamics for formal purposes: to build to and from the climax* and to punctuate the coda. (On this idea of climax, see the heading entitled “Form” below.)
  3. Though it sounds really busy, much of the counterpoint in this piece actually consists only of 2-4 voices.
  4. Chromatic clusters feature prominently in the harmony—but when I say “harmony,” I don’t refer only to “vertical simultaneities.” For instance, I hear the opening clarinet duo more as an “arpeggiated” chromatic pentad (filling in and including all the chromatic notes of a P4) that gradually shifts upward from D3-G3 to E3-A3.
  5. No one will claim that this movement is easy to play. However, for three reasons, Ligeti’s voice-leading choices do make it more gracious than not to play:
    1. Though statistically the instruments are “arpeggiating” chromatic clusters of various sizes, Ligeti tends to avoid chromatic intervals unless he’s writing a fragment of the chromatic scale (3+ notes).’
    2. In turn, much of this “arpeggiation” takes place within the span of a fifth or even smaller. Further, within this span, two-thirds of the voice-leading consists of stepwise motion. The remaining voice-leading consists mostly of thirds, with only the occasional fourth or fifth. In other words, though these lines are fast, they require little physical motion.
    3. In situations when the arpeggiation spans wider than a fifth, Ligeti writes idiomatically for the instruments. For instance, the string writing in bar 43 ff. is accomplished by simple string crossing (of adjacent strings); fingering the exact pitches is otherwise just as economical as if Ligeti had written it all within the span of a fourth.
  6. Ligeti uses chromatic clusters prominently but not exclusively. For instance, near the end of the piece, the chromatic lines begin to be voice-led (roughly) by perfect fifths (see note in bar 49). Likewise, the run in bar 7 starts as a chromatic cluster but widens into a Major 7th chord, and then a polytonal one in bar 8. The tonal reference of these sonorities is very weak, but the difference in harmonic content and voicing is clearly audible.
  7. This is a good place to note that the distinction between “Pitch set” and “Pitch-class set” is very useful in this piece. “Pitch-class set” describes “all the pitches sounding irrespective of their octave.” In contrast, “pitch set” refers to the actual registers in which those pitches reside. The collection of pitches in bar 8 may all belong to the chromatic hexatonic pitch-class set (m2-m3-m2-m3-m2), but the pitch set of this collection is audibly arranged as a polychord (B-flat minor over D major). Now, in common-practice music, triads can be voiced, inverted, and doubled in myriad ways but still retain a clear relationship to their root-position chord. Not so in chromatic music: very few (if any) people will hear the Dmaj-Bbmin polychord as a revoicing of chromatic hexatonic collection.

Form

I hear the piece in four major sections. The closure of three of these (1st, 2nd, 4th) is defined a harmonic coalescence around a dyad or triad. The third major section comes to repose by reaching the registral extreme of the piano.

  • I
    • bar 1: two clarinets fill in a D3-G3 that gradually shifts up to E3-A3 and then thins out . . .
    • bar 5: coalescing on the E3-A3 dyad and ending in an upward run (bar 7) to
    • bar 8: coalesce on D major/B-flat minor polychord spanning D5-F6. The registral band narrows to . . .
    • bar 14: the E6-F6 trill, which voice-leads up to . . .
  • II
    • bar 15: F#, inaugurating a unison (+ 4 octaves) line between the piccolo and bass clarinet. This line is re-orchestrated/doubled in various chromatic pitch-class sets. It’s taken over by the piano as P5 (+ 4 octaves) at the end of bar 23.
    • bar 24: The horn (which entered on a sustain note in bar 22) leads off a melodic line (doubled by strings then winds). The surface rhythm of this line gradually accelerates as its register also increases. Meanwhile the piano (sempre fortissimo) also increases in density and register until . . .
  • III
    • bar 31: It is cut off by the double bass solo (with a subtle trombone sustain) that chromatically spans E1-A1. This band remains ≈P4/A4, changes color slightly (other instruments with these same pitches and rhythms that align on but not within notated beats) slowly transposes up . . .
    • bar 40: . . . to coalesce on C#2-G2 dyad with bass clarinet and cello
  • IV
    • bar 42: The violins, viola, and cello begin to arpeggiate chromatic lines roughly a fifth apart (and span roughly 2.5 octaves) that are moving upward at an unstable, unequal rate. In bar 45, the winds enter, sustaining pitches from the strings. In bar 46, the strings exchange similar for contrary motion until . . .
    • bar 49: the strings ultimately (albeit for only half a bar) arpeggiate a 6-octave span of fifths from Bb1 to F#6. They then move by contrary motion inward. Meanwhile, high winds resume their chattering over a span of about an octave that rises over two bars from the bass register into the soprano/alto one, then only above the treble staff (roughly mid bar 51).
    • bar 52: Meanwhile, the strings’ contrary motion leads to the cello and bass sustaining A3 and the violins and viola trilling A4/Bb4.
    • bar 53: The high wind chatter narrows around and then leaves only the oboe’s  loooong forte D#6 (against the strings’ A/Bb).
  • Coda: Ligeti finishes by arpeggiating 3-4 chromatic clusters (depending on how you want to count them) in the winds and keyboards: two loud gestures followed by a few quiet ones.

To sum up, here is my simplified, not-at-all-to-scale, graphical-sketch-on-a-post-it-note (the relative height of the lines represents pitch):

Post-it note sketch of Ligeti Chamber Concerto mvt IV.jpeg
A quick post-it note sketch of the form of the fourth movement of Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto.

I asterisked the word climax when I mentioned it in the previous heading. I’m not definitively prepared to say that the loud part at the end of section II is the movement’s climax. It is definitely “the loudest part in the middle of the piece,” so in that sense, it is climactic. However, section IV leads also somewhere just as rich (the widest and fullest texture of the whole piece) and noteworthy (the loooong, loud oboe note).

Lacking the time to examine the particulars closely enough to build a solid case one way or the other, I will point out that the build to fortissimo in section II does create a reference point to which the end of section IV/start of the coda responds. In other words, just as the formal parallelisms between the four sections help demarcate them as sections, the parallels between the ending of sections II and IV are formally significant. That is, what happens at the end of section II helps the end of the piece sound like the end of the piece.

Takeaways I Will Use Immediately

Though some of these general and formal observations will be useful for me in writing my piece for Hub New Music, my most immediate takeaways have to do with deliberate use of register and density. Here are some compositional exercises and experiments I’m going to try as a result of studying this piece:

  • Identify narrow registral bands (less than, say, 1.5 octaves). Sketch some ideas specific to that register and its associated tone colors. (Karalyn Schubring has a cool piano piece that does this.)
  • Imagine these passages:
    • using different collections
    • in different registers
    • at different dynamics
    • with different doublings/parallel motion
  • What different gestures can I create, more than static bands?
    • Upward/downward runs?
    • Expanding and contracting collections?
    • Different “interference patterns” (polyrhythms or distinct rhythmic layers)?
    • These, in combination with increasing/decreasing voices? Changing doublings?
  • How long must one of these gestures be so that it doesn’t sound like a melody but as something larger? (I imagine the answer exists in relation to (1) the size of the collection I’m trying to express, (2) the number of voices expressing that collection, and (3) the rate at which the whole collection can be presented.)
  • Of what different idioms can I take advantage for the various instruments that will make my music easier for them to play?

Developing these initial experiments and having some clear reference points for them was my purpose for analyzing that movement by Ligeti. By the time you read this blog post, I will have already conducted many of these experiments.

Open post

One Way Writing for Harp is Different Than Writing for Piano

At the start of the year, I began working in earnest on the flute and harp piece I wrote for Luke Blackburn’s EcoMusic concert. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic is no longer happening this week, but that postponement does allow for a special opportunity! See below for more details.

During the idea-gathering phase, besides reading all about butterflies and toying with some musical metaphors about them, I also perused the flute and harp literature for ideas.

After surveying a bunch of harp music, something just clicked. I realized something I hadn’t noticed before about writing for harp: Unlike in piano writing, harp parts rarely feature fleshed out inner voices.

In fact, of the two dozen or so pieces I looked at today, I saw barely any inner voice writing that went beyond voice leading between chords. Take Britten’s Suite for Harp. Or Saariaho’s Tocar. Or Pierné’s Impromptu-Caprice. Or Tüür’s Prints. Stylistically, these pieces are all over the map. But they all lack any substantive inner-voice writing. Colin Matthew’s Little Suite has maybe a dozen bars of an independent middle voice, but also mostly aligns with this trend.

The harp: not an inner voice instrument.

Looking now over nkoda’s “Essential Harp” collection of scores:

  • The Scarlatti sonatas have some — but mostly not
  • Ditto the Handel B-flat concerto
  • Glinka’s Mozart Variations are entirely devoid of it
  • Ginastera’s Harp Concerto has some mildly independent inner voice writing — but only in the second movement
  • Jolivet’s Prelude again only has some mildly independent writing

. . .  and so it goes. Now, I’m sure there are plenty of harp players out there who can point me to their secret stash of pieces with rich inner voices. But from what I can tell, such writing is just not idiomatic for the harp.

What seems to be most common is textures of 1 or 2 layers. In fact, some of the most common textures seem to be (1) 2 notes in one hand and one note in the other, (2) one note per hand, or even (3) one note at a time.

These textures may be embellished (unsurprisingly) with all manner of arpeggiation, figuration, and doubling/planing. They may sometimes even feature block chords with smooth voice leading — but this still counts as doing one thing.

So I wrote my flute and harp piece accordingly. Here’s a draft of the first movement:

Learn more about the piece here.

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