Tag: creative process

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Top 5 Tips to Get Better at Composing

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:

  1. Ask a teacher or peer who knows you and your music
  2. 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.

Last but not least, I'd love to hear your take:

  • Did I miss anything on this list?
  • What else would you have added?
  • What other questions do it leave?

 

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A Composition Lesson from Stephen Sondheim

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:

  1. Content dictates form
  2. It’s always worth the time to make your rhymes perfect
  3. Live the adage, “Be willing to kill your darlings”

You can read the details here.

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The Importance of Stupidity in Music Composition

Today I wanted to share with you one of my favorite articles: “The importance of stupidity in scientific research” by Martin Schwartz from the Journal of Cell Science.

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."

👉 Read Schwartz’s full article here.

Then, let me know in the comments: How do Schwartz’s thoughts inspire you in your creative process?

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Flow like Water: Developing a Professional Creative Process

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”:

  1. Consulting 
  2. Connecting 
  3. Sketching 
  4. Assembling 
  5. Revising 
  6. 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.

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The Two Fluencies Professional Composers Must Have

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.

Despite rumors to the contrary, even Mozart didn’t just take dictation. (Beethoven sure as heck didn’t.)

So what does a professional-level compositional process look like? It has six key elements:

  1. 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.
  2. Brainstorming tools that enable you to cultivate inspiration actively rather than waiting for it to “just happen.”
  3. Sketching tools that free you from the tyranny of perfectionism and “It has to come all at once.”
  4. Composing tools that show how to assemble your sketches in multiple ways besides “left to right.”
  5. Revising tools that give you constructive feedback rather than a general “This isn’t any good!”
  6. Shipping tools that make proofreading/parts-creation or mixing/mastering a breeze.

These details will be the subject of next week’s post.

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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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Some Preliminary Notes on John Adams’s Phrygian Gates

Last week, I posted some notes about the fourth movement of Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto. As I thought further about what I wanted to do musically in my Hub New Music piece, I thought of John Adams’s Phrygian Gates. What I hear common to both pieces is a harmonic wash—that is, both pieces saturate entire spans of a register using collections of seconds.

Adams’s piece interests me because his harmonic wash is modal rather than chromatic. Further, it (often) has a discernible pulse and is constructed from repeating, distinct melodic cells. (In contrast, Ligeti’s piece generally features rhythms that are presto possible and  pitch sequences that are deliberately patternless, within each passage’s given constraints.)

So before I go further, here is Adams’s piece, for your listening pleasure:

General Observations

Because my analytical purpose is to gather ideas for my own composition, I will not examine the entire piece in depth. These, however, are some parameters worth noting:

  1. Most of piece consists of steady eighth- and 16th-note surface rhythms that often create a sense of pulse but never of beat. Some passages feature a quarter-note pulse (e.g., m. 554 ff.). Adams also composes the central section, “A Series of Weights and Measures” (m. 640-808), using tied whole notes of notably uneven durations.
  2. On a local level, Adams creates consistency be establishing “interference patterns” between the right and left hand. For instance, in bar 8, he juxtaposes a 3-note cell against a 2-note one. (The periodic unisons these particular cells create is not a bug; it creates a shimmer whose cause is just beyond the reach of most careful listeners.)
    Phrygian Gates ex 1 interference patterns.png
  3. These cells tend to be little upward gestures. Or least, they begin with an upward gesture before a downward one (cf. bar 201 ff.). Thus, the contrast at bar 255 ff., with its clear downward microgestures, is notable (cf. bars 518 ff. and 954 ff.).
  4. These cells often consist of one note per hand, but regularly contain as many as four. Generally, these chords remain static for the duration of the phrase, though there is at least one passage (bar 159 ff.) in which the pianist must undulate between dyads.
  5. Adams beams each pattern separately, making it easy to divide the piece into separate phrases. In each phrase, Adams varies the length and pitch content of its constituent cells. Because individuals phrases often maintain a cell from their preceding phrase, because large sections of the piece maintain a steady pulse, and because Adams further instructs the performer that “no single pattern [should] ever dominate[ ] another,” it can be difficult to tell when one phrase ends and another begins. Thus, this separation into “phrases” by beaming is often more a courtesy to the performer than a distinction Adams intends the listener to hear.
  6. Sometimes Adams introduces both cells at the start of the phrase (see observation no. 1 above). Other times, he elides the start of one cell with the ending of a previous cell, for instance, in bar 19:
    Phrygian Gates ex 1b interference patterns.png
  7. From the start, Adams adds disruptive elements to most phrases. For instance, in the phrase that begins in bar 9, Adams disrupts the right hand’s 3-note cells with 2-note interjections (bracketed in red).Phrygian Gates ex 2 interruptions.png
    Sometimes Adams inserts these interjections between cells, as in the example above. Other times, they replace notes in existing cells. For instance, in bar 37, Adams sets up a new pattern, but in bar 37, he replaces the last note of the right hand’s cell with a foreign pitch (bracketed):
    Phrygian Gates ex 3 replacement.png
  8. These interruptions and replacements have several effects:
    • By changing the alignment of a phrase’s cells, they change the resulting  interference pattern.
    • They create notable landmarks, (1) because they occur only a handful of times, (2) because they happen at unpredictable intervals, and (3) because they consist of pitches that don’t belong to the prevailing pattern.
  9. Adams, like Ligeti, uses voice leading to shape individual phrases into larger trajectories. For instance, the most formally significant melodic motion in bars 1-57 is the slow, stepwise descent of E4 to A3.
  10. Like Ligeti, Adams, also sometimes uses gestures to create trajectories. For instance, in bars 85-113, Adams gradually adds pitches above the interrupting E5, creating an “expanding-density gesture.” After B5 comes in bar 96, the addition of a pitch in the subsequent phrase’s interrupting element is expected, though not necessarily the specific pitch and timing (E6 in bar 104).

A Lengthy Digression on Adams’s Use of Modes

In his program notes, Adams explains that “‘Gates,’ a term borrowed from electronics, are the moments when the modes abruptly and without warning shift.” On a local level, “mode” in Phrygian Gates, however, often means something more akin to “diatonic collection” than it does to “scale.” “Scale” describes well Vaughan Williams’s use of modes to create clear pitch hierarchies. In Debussy, too, though these hierarchies can be more ambiguous, they consistently operate on both local and formal levels. In contrast, because Adams composes his phrases out of static cells, voice leading only functions on a formal level in Phrygian Gates. In consequence to both its static cellular construction and its formal-only voice leading, the piece only weakly, if at all, creates the sense of pitch centricity necessary to cast its modal pitches into hierarchal relationships with one another.

Indeed, the opening 113 bars of the piece seem to deliberate obfuscate the pitch A as the “root” or “center” of the four-sharp diatonic collection. In fact, the piece sounds E-centric when it opens and C#-centric in bar 44. When the long-range voice leading finally arrives at A3 in 56, Adams creates further confusion by interjecting the extra-modal Bb.

Now, I wrote that “‘mode’ in Phrygian Gates . . . often means something more akin to ‘diatonic collection’” because there are some exceptions. The E phrygian section that begins in bar 236 does sound like E-phrygian, not simply the white-key diatonic collection, because Adams thoroughly grounds it on E1 and E2 in the bass (cf. the C# in bars 640-808). Contrast this with the B-lydian music that follows it (bar 266): as with the opening “A lydian” music, B does not project itself as the center of a pitch hierarchy. Instead, whatever pitch is in the bass generally sounds most important. Thus, B gains its pre-eminence only in bar 311.

In short, Phrygian Gates generally lacks pitch hierarchies. Its pitches generally attain prominence for registral and timing reasons rather than voice-leading ones. Perhaps surprisingly given their radically different harmonic colors, Phrygian Gates and the fourth movement of Ligeti’s concerto both share this harmonic feature. However, whereas Ligeti achieves this lack of pitch hierarchy by using the symmetrical chromatic scale, Adams achieves it by constructing his piece using repeating, static melodic cells.

Lastly, I should note in passing the formal design of Adams’s modal usage. Adams mentions in the program note that the piece is “a 22-minute tour of half of the cycle of keys” that switches between the Lydian and Phrygian modes in each key change. Other scholars have diagrammed this progression (e.g., p. 14 here, cf. p. 135 here) and even debated each section’s modal identities. These details don’t really matter to me. The big picture affirms this general compositional wisdom: pitch-centric compositions longer than 3-5 minutes generally require shifts in collection and centricity to keep the listener’s attention.

Takeaways

As with analyzing Ligeti’s piece, my purpose in analyzing Adams’s is to help me identify some potential composition exercises to better capture the sound I was imagining. So here are the ideas that I have:

  • I don’t think I want to compose my piece out of short, static cells. However, I could try composing it out of short, static phrases—like Michael Torke’s Yellow Pages (that’s a whole other analysis project). Like Adams, I can experiment with placing these phrases in counterpoint with each other. So, to begin with, here’s my task:
    • Write a variety of short, static phrases
    • These phrases should vary in
      • length
      • rhythm (unlike Adams’s which are at a steady rhythm)
      • overall pulse (e.g., is this phrase mostly a 16th-note gesture or an 8th-note one?)
      • pitch content — more specifically
        • mode/collection
        • subsets of that mode/collection
        • stepwise vs. arpeggiated motion
      • density — they can consist of up to 3 pitches (though probably in closed voicing to start)
    • Identify: Do single/simple-contour phrases work better than ones that seem like little melodies?
  • Having written these phrases, I will then experiment in combining them
    • Which ones sound good with each other? At which transpositions?
    • What different orderings can I create?
  • Next, how can I disrupt these phrases? What is the effect of different lengths of disruptions?

Again, by the time you read this, I’ll likely have already conducted these experiments.

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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.

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Behind the Scenes on “Motion Lines,” from the PRISM Quartet’s latest album

As you may have heard, the PRISM Quartet’s latest album, Surfaces and Essences, came out this past week. I’m thrilled that my piece “Motion Lines” was on it—along with a bunch of other great music by Christopher Biggs, Victoria Cheah, Viet Cuong, and Emily Koh.

First things first, if you haven’t listened to the album yet, go do that!

Then, be sure to purchase it from Apple Music or Amazon and support the PRISM Quartet.

You can also find the sheet music here.

Now, Join Me Behind the Scenes

That’s the shiny professional part. I wanted to take you behind the scenes, though, to give you a peek at what the composing process was like. Ever since 2004, I’ve kept a steady journal. Every week I write something. Most weeks I write a lot more. So I dug into my journal to pull out some scenes from the process of writing for and collaborating with the PRISM Quartet . . .

From the Project Notes: (Undated)

For every composition I write, I keep a text file of musical ideas, revision notes, possible titles, etc. Here is the original outline I wrote for the piece:

And here’s me talking more about these notes on YouTube:

While Composing: December 6, 2016

I didn’t end up writing a lot about the composing process itself, but hands down (pardon my pun, as you’ll soon see), this was the most eventful thing that happened during it: my first time ever getting stitches.

“I got stitches today after proving how sharp Cutco knives are while cutting an apple. Oops. The cut didn’t seem bad, but it soon became clear that the band-aid was no match for it. So on went a gauze pad over the band-aid and over I went to the urgent care center. $20 and an hour later, I had my stitches. . . .

“After coming home, I ate some, and eventually took a nap. I couldn’t focus. When I woke up, I eventually composed some until I went to the movie (Dr. Strange) with some friends.”

In addition to keeping a journal, I also save backups of my work every day. So I can show you, here, after getting stitches, is what the piece looked like by the end of December 6:

At the Rehearsal: January 27, 2017

Most rehearsals of new music sound like a partially carved statue looks. With the PRISM Quartet, the experience was different:

“The rehearsal went well. I was delighted that ‘Motion Lines’ is sounding as I had hoped it would. It’s fun to hear it first shaping into something musical. It’s funny, too, how there’s totally a sax player personality, and they all have it, refracted through the lenses of their individual personalities.”

I only wish I were cool enough to have the sax player personality.

After the Concert: January 29, 2017

In addition to how much I loved the PRISM Quartet’s performance of my piece, something else that stood out was how different the pieces were that we Brandeis students wrote for them. Despite this diversity of styles, PRISM knocked all the performances out of the park.

“The concert was fantastic. My piece got a great performance, and I received some really positive feedback from Eric and Davy as well as from my peers, including Richard, Talia, and Jeremy. Davy’s piece ‘Compass,’ which followed mine and concluded the concert, was easily the most like mine. Jeremy’s was the next closest, having a linear narrative, but its surface was way more sound- (rather than harmony-) focused, like the other five pieces. I liked them all a lot. As I was telling Talia and Alex after the concert, I find my peers really inspiring because they all do such different things at such a high level. That and they’re friendly, articulate, and supportive.”

PRISM Quartet at Brandeis. Image courtesy of Emily Koh

Afterword

After the concert, I assumed that was that. I had a great time working with the PRISM Quartet, and they made a great recording of my piece. But ten months later, Matt Levy emailed me asking if they could include “Motion Lines” on a forthcoming album. Of course, I said yes.

Although the album started in 2017, most of my contributions to it—preparing an initial mix, putting together program notes, and so on—didn’t happen until the second half of 2019. Almost all of that correspondence happened through email, and, well, now you can see and hear the result.

If you haven’t yet listened to the album, go check it out at all the usual places: Apple Music, Amazon, Spotify, PRISM’s website. Then, if you want the the sheet music, it’s available here.

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“What Gets Measured Gets Managed”

“What gets measured gets managed” is the quote attributed to Peter Drucker. For all that can be criticized about this idea, it’s useful to consider in composing.

So let’s consider them! Here are some ways you can measure (or not) your work:

1: By how you feel about it

This is the worst way to measure your work. A favorite fable of mine explains why (you may have heard this before):

Once upon a time, a farmer asked his son to plow a field.

“Son,” he said. “Always make sure that you choose a point on the horizon to steer by. That way your lines will be straight and true.”

His son nodded at this advice comprehendingly, so the farmer went away to work on other chores.

But when he came back, the field was mess. Lines criss-crossed

“Son, what happened?” he asked. “Why is the field a mess?”

Measuring your work by how you feel about it is like following the rabbit. It does not give you a firm point on the horizon by which to steer.

Every artist knows this: Some days we feel like working. Other days we don’t. Some days we believe our work to be fabulous. Other days we consider ourselves failures. Thus, if you try to measure your progress by how you feel, you will never get an accurate read on the state of your project.

2: By measures written

Number of bars written often seems like a natural metric, but it’s not always useful.

On the surface, “measures written per day” seems like it could be a more useful metric. For film and TV music, it might well be: once you set your tempo and your hit points, you know exactly how many measures you must finish to complete the cue and send it to your orchestrator.

In my experience writing concert music, however, it’s a far more slippery metric. I find myself revising “completed” bars constantly. So then do I measure the number of bars written and the number revised? I’ve tried this, and it’s not helpful because neither gives me a good gauge on the progress of a composition.

Although measuring “bars written per day” has been less helpful for me in tracking a projects overall progress, I resonate with this secondhand advice I got from Tarik O’Regan (via Matt Nielsen): “Write at least one measure per day.”

The power of this metric is that it gets you started: this is a judgment-free bar of music. Its purpose is simply to express a musical thought — any musical thought. Just speak what’s on your mind musically. That’s what you do verbally with your friends and you don’t judge yourself, so why would you judge yourself for writing what’s on your mind?

And it turns out, it’s really hard to write just one bar of music. You’ll probably end up writing 4 or even 8. And once you do, you’ll start fussing over it. Before you know it, you’ll have at least a semi-interesting musical idea. Sometimes, this process will yield good ideas, and even occasionally great ones.

3: By time spent

I have the BYU composition seminar to thank for this metric. During one of my undergrad years, Neil Thornock had us track the number of hours we spent each week composing. The idea was that if violinists had to practice for 20 hours per week and pianists had to practice for 20 zillion hours per week (conservatively estimated), we composers should be logging at least 10 hours weekly.

So I dutifully kept track of my composing hours that semester and discovered that, as it turned out, it took me about 10 billable hours to complete a minute of finished music. Per “billable hours,” I was strict about logging this time: bathroom breaks, email, etc. all stopped the clock. 

In tracking my hours since then, I’ve discovered that 10 hours seems to be a good ballpark measure for me to estimate how long a project will take. Complicated projects take longer (Glimmer, Glisten, Glow required about 12 hours per finished minute). Simpler ones go by faster (Aspen Song required less than 5 hours per finished minute). But 10 hours per minute is, overall, a good estimate.

Armed with this knowledge, I can reasonably map out a project timeline. For instance, my Barlow commission for Hub New Music has a proposed duration of 8-10 minutes. Given that will take me around 100 hours to complete, and a sustainable work week entails 15 composing hours, I estimate I’ll be able to complete it in about 6 weeks — which is great, because it’s due in about 9 weeks.

4: By milestones

The downside with even hours, though, is that even though they give me a rough idea of when the piece as a whole will be done, they still don’t create any internal benchmarks. Having milestones makes it a LOT easier to compose a piece of music. By breaking the project down into chunks, you can know when you’ve completed work for the day. You can avoid overwhelmed feelings from the project seeming too big and unknowable in scope.

Writers (and composers) often hear the advice that they should write a lot of drafts. What do those drafts look like? Honestly, artists being the creative people they are, they can take a variety of forms.

Here’s what they look like for me:

  • chaos stage: developing material and artistic meaning
  • outline draft: material and its ordering identified for each section
  • continuity draft: every bar has something in it from start to finish
  • good draft: each bar has a complete texture from start to finish
  • completed draft: the whole has been polished, but not proofread
  • final draft: proofread, not yet performed
  • final version: rehearsing and performance issues incorporated

These milestones are useful for me, because they each represent a distinct stage of progress.

The hardest part of the process for me is the “chaos stage,” because I’ve struggled to figure out how to measure progress in that area. Which makes sense — how do you measure what is fundamentally play?

As I write my piece for Hub New Music, I’ll experiment with the “bars written” metric for this stage — the point being not to revise these bars but to come up with as many ideas and as many variations on these ideas as it takes for me to find and capture the artistic vision.

Takeaways

Having given you some insights into my process, I’m curious to know:

  • What have you found works for you?
  • What methods from above are you interested in trying?
  • What suggestions do you have for me for how I can better handle the “chaos stage”?

Happy composing!

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