Inspiration | Joseph Sowa

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:

Ask a teacher or peer who knows you and your music
Follow your gut

I'm guessing (/hoping) you already have ideas — follow those.

I’m also happy to meet with composers (for free!) to talk about their music and goals and identify what next steps they can take. Feel free to schedule a call with me.

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?

Speak Your Musical Truth

A musical idea is not just something you visualize in your brain or even something you hear in your mind’s ear. It is both those things and more.

It is most of all something you feel in your GUT.

It is as instinctive and as personal and as urgent as the words you speak.

Sometimes you cannot immediately articulate that gut-level feeling, but it is nonetheless real, viscerally TRUE — waiting for you to give it its fullest expression, whether in words or in music.

For this reason, questions about “clichés” and “originality” and “groundbreaking-ness” are utterly beside the point.

When you speak your musical truth from your heart, what else matters?

Two Conflicting Views on Influence

A few months ago, I watched School of Rock for the first time. In the movie, Jack Black’s character explains to the school children, “The first thing you do when you start a band is talk about your influences. That’s how you figure out what kind of band you want to be.”

ImagePierreBoulez-CliveBarda-DGG2 — Pierre Boulez

Things aren’t as simple in the contemporary music world. In one corner, we have the ever pugnacious Pierre Boulez: “All kinds of references, for me are absolutely useless. If I want to be myself, I don’t need references. I want to be myself. Period.”

In the other corner, Alexander Goehr: “Early on I was influenced by something that Boulez said to me, which had an enormous effect on me in an exactly inverse way to what he intended. He was looking at a piece of mine, and he pointed out that at one point I’d reached a kind of dominant seventh, which, he said, created a false kind of tonal anticipation. Because of the wrong accidentals, I’d not realized this. . . . You come across such moments coincidentally, in the part-writing, and I’ve always regarded them as God’s gifts. If I hear a quote from the Ring, or Janáček, I don’t want to cut it out, as Boulez does: no, I want to keep it, and develop it.”

These divergent attitudes give a good overview of a persistent artistic question: Does being original mean doing things no one has done before? Or is the Preacher right that “there is no new thing under the sun,” thus making originality the way an artist makes old things new?

To me, the devotion of composers such as Pierre Boulez and Morton Feldman to stylistic purity strikes me as misplaced. Despite their claims to the contrary, I’m skeptical that non-referentiality is even possible. I think Harrison Birtwistle said it best, “After all, we all come from somewhere: we don’t invent it for ourselves; we don’t come from the moon.”

Discovery: My Title Had Two Beginnings

Sometimes I write music “about” something. Other times I simply write music. My recent orchestra piece was one of those latter times. All the while I was writing it, I struggled to come up with a title. Even after completing the piece, two revisions later, and after having distributed the parts to the musicians, I still didn’t have a title for it. It was simply “Orchestra Piece.” I had an idea of what the music meant to me—life, light, energy—but I couldn’t encapsulate these feelings into words. Among my initial rejects were “It’s a Magical World” (the title of the first draft), “Sunflower,” and “Bodies Celestial.”

Daffodils — Wordsworth's poem neatly combined two images I had about the music: flowers (specifically daffodils, as seen above) and stars.

In the midst of this struggle to devise a title, one of my friends suggested that I look through some of her poetry books. I went through several, copying down lines I liked and mashing them together until I came up with a title that felt right: “Summer Has Ten Thousand Stars.” It fit, and that was the end of the story. I didn’t bother to remember what the poems were.

Or so I thought. This morning as I was sorting through my papers, I found a copy of Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” dated from February 2008. At first I didn’t recognize the poem until I came to the lines “Continuous as the stars that shine / And twinkle on the milky way, / . . . Ten thousand saw I at a glance” (emphasis added). Suddenly, I realized, “Hey! This is that poem I used to come up with the title for my orchestra piece!” I was quite surprised. It would seem that this image has been sitting with me for the last two years, waiting to be rediscovered.

(As for the “Summer Has” part, I looked it up: It’s from Dickinson.)

Tag: Inspiration