Category: Wizarding School for Composers

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.

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.