Wizarding school | Joseph Sowa

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”:

Consulting
Connecting
Sketching
Assembling
Revising
Shipping

These workspaces are NOT a series of steps, nor typically are they discrete, physical locations. Rather, they reflect different ways of thinking about, relating to, or interacting with our music and our collaborators.

Let’s examine each of these elements in turn . . .

Consulting

This workspace is where you determine your patrons’, employers’, and collaborators’ needs. Often the starting and ending point of the creative process, it shows up in the middle not infrequently, too.

This is where you ask questions to hear and internalize your collaborators’ needs and desires, where you brainstorm together to develop ideas, and where you go to enrich your own ideas with other perspectives.

You can visualize this workspace as a big conference room table (with donuts or other snacks!), a set of comfortable couches, or even the booth at your favorite restaurant or bar — anywhere you can picture yourself sitting, talking, and hanging with your collaborators.

Connecting

“Connecting” is where you cultivate inspiration actively rather than waiting for it to “just happen.” This workspace is what many composers call “pre-composition” (though, like all six workspaces, it is used throughout the creative process).

My favorite way to visualize this space is as a big “conspiracy wall.”

Your job here is to make meaning — to identify why you care about what you’re writing:

How does this current project relate to your past ones?
What specifically influences this current project?
- A treasured memory? A recent experience you just had?
- A TV show you were just watching?
- A line from a book you just read?
- Certain passages or whole pieces of music?
What kinds of connections might others make to what you are creating?

The ideas you generate here all count. They’re all valuable even if they never show up in the final piece.

The goal here is to make it easy and inevitable for you to write music, because you have developed something to say.

Sketching

Sketching is the sandbox of the creative process. It’s play time. It’s magic markers and play dough and make believe.

This workspace is where the rubber hits the road: namely, where you convert your inspiration into pitches and rhythms (notated or recorded).

The goal of sketching depends on where you are in writing your piece:

“Assembling” requires ideas to arrange. Sketching creates those ideas.
“Revising” needs alternatives to composed phrases. Sketching creates those alternatives.

By definition, every idea here is half-baked and incomplete because they are all at the service of assembling and revising. This recognition can free you from the tyranny of perfectionism.

Assembling

Assembling is the workbench of the creative process. It reflects the literal definition of the word compose: namely, to put together. It’s where you organize and assemble your sketches into complete phrases, phrase groups, and sections.

Composing complete phrases is essential to working happily and effectively in the “Assembling” workspace. Because phrases are the shortest unit of a complete musical thought, if you fixate on shorter or longer timescales, you will struggle to get a firm grasp on just what your musical thoughts are.

This focus on phrases and sections also helps you escape the “left to right” mindset. Because the Assembling workspace results in complete musical thoughts, you can shuffle around and develop these thoughts without having to peg them to a certain place on the timeline.

Now, what counts as a complete phrase varies by composer and project. Sometimes, and for some people, this includes the full orchestration. For others, the arrangement and production are tasks part of the “Revising” workspace.

What matters in this workspace is that you include all the details necessary to capture your complete musical thought, phrase by phrase.

Revising

Revising is like staining, decorating, and sealing a piece of woodworking. This is where you deepen connections between phrases, remove excess details, and polish the remaining ones.

This workspace is often where craft takes over from creativity.

This workspace is often analytical. Its goal isn’t to render a judgment on artistic worthiness but to exercise discernment. Here you ask questions like:

How well does this passage capture my inspiration?
Is it clear that I want this passage to be the focal point and not that one?
What technical tools can I use to enhance these relationships?

Somewhat paradoxically, by focusing the mind on specific details, this revising workspace liberates the unconscious (or the muse, whatever you want to call it) to speak more clearly by harnessing a tool called mental simulation.

Shipping

Shipping is the mundane bit: the concession that “my musicians want sheet music to play from” or “the sound editor needs stems he can create the show’s final mix with.”

This grunt work includes work like tidying the notation, proofreading the score, making parts, or mixing and mastering your track.

In early stages of a professional career, composers often have to do these things themselves, but as they become more established, shrewd (and otherwise busy) composers outsource these tasks to other people.

Between managing outsourced tasks and confirming deliverables, work in this space often happens in tandem with Consulting.

These Workspaces Are NOT a Timeline

If you are a professional composer or have been working to become one, all these workspaces will sound familiar to you.

However, one of the biggest mistakes people make when conceptualizing the creative process is imagining it as a linear process through time.

The professional creative process I describe is best understood spatially.

Your creative process is NOT a specific ordering of these workstations. It is not a series of “stages” or a timeline. Rather, it is the ever-changing paths you trace between them.

Thinking in these terms helps you avoid getting fazed whenever the path of writing “this piece” looks different than the way you wrote “the last one.”

Indeed, that path inevitably varies from project to project:

Sometimes it looks like, “Sketch → Assemble → Connect → Consult → Revise → Connect → Revise → Ship.”
Or it can look like, “Consult → Connect → Sketch → Assemble → Connect → Sketch → Revise → Ship.”
Or any of an endless number of permutations.

For some projects, you might even hardly use some of the workstations.

Likewise, the time you spend in each workstation is typically not measured in days or weeks. Usually, in any single workspace composers spend at most a few hours, but often as little as a few minutes.

This frequent turnover happens because these workspaces describe the nature of what you’re doing, not an overall roadmap.

Again, thinking in terms of workspaces can lessen your anxiety, because the answer to “Where should I be right now?” isn’t a pre-determined checklist.

Instead, it is the encouraging assurance, “You only ‘need’ to be in whatever workstation would best help you advance the project and maintain your energy and enthusiasm.”

Why You Need a Professional-Level Creative Process

The primary challenges that technically proficient composers face are process issues.

These process issues usually do not signal technical deficiencies. They are also not artistic indictments or moral failings.

And, most of the time, they are not cause for existential meltdowns. (As a professional, you will have those occasionally because you’re human, NOT regularly because you are a composer.)

A professional creative process collects the rain of your inspiration into a river of steady output. Like good floodplain management, it mitigates creative emergencies:

It gives you tried and tried practices and frameworks so you can navigate everyday creative questions with hardly a second thought.
It prevents major creative issues from happening frequently.
When major issues do happen, it ensures that you can get through them with minimal anxiety.

The creative process model I describe above does all this. This is why, when describing the Four Elements of Compositional Magic, I call it Flow and associate it with water.

In future posts, I will show how this Flow magic (water) works together with World Building (earth), Sleight of Hand (air), and Inspiration (fire) to help you reliably create musical magic.

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:

Consulting tools that get you out of your head, help you internalize your collaborators’ needs and desires, and enrich your own ideas with other perspectives.
Brainstorming tools that enable you to cultivate inspiration actively rather than waiting for it to “just happen.”
Sketching tools that free you from the tyranny of perfectionism and “It has to come all at once.”
Composing tools that show how to assemble your sketches in multiple ways besides “left to right.”
Revising tools that give you constructive feedback rather than a general “This isn’t any good!”
Shipping tools that make proofreading/parts-creation or mixing/mastering a breeze.

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

How Composers Used To — and Could — Be Trained

Anyone who has studied music history knows that musicians have been theorizing about music for millennia. However, that theory has not always served as the basis for musical training.

In particular, many classical composers did not learn “music theory” as contemporary musicians typically understand it. Reconstructing how composers used to be taught has been a major facet of Robert Gjerdingen’s life’s work.

Gjerdingen is an emeritus professor of music theory, cognition, and history at Northwestern University. In interviews, articles, presentations, and two main books, Music in the Galant Style and Child Composers in Old Conservatories, he paints a detailed picture of how different composers’ training was.

The Origins of the Modern Music Theory Core

Most pointedly, he shows how our modern university music theory core is a 19th-century invention. In an interview with Nikhil Hogan (see also this interview and Child Composers pp. 311–324), Gjerdingen explains:

“Chord grammar” models what chord progressions are stylistic to Common Practice music. It also categorizes chords by their cadential function: Predominant, Dominant, or Tonic.

“Chord grammar was developed for middle- and upper-class dilettantes who were taking college classes. They were in a higher social status than musicians. Musicians were artisans. They worked with their hands. They went to trade school. They worked for the people who got to go into college.

“The artisans spent a lifetime learning all the details of this stuff, and in college, [the dilettantes] just learned about it. [For instance,] you could take a class on space travel: You don’t how to go to space, you just read about it. In the same way, in a harmony class, you read about harmony.

“The sleight of hand that was developed in the 19th century was to imagine that everything is a cadence. Whole pieces are cadences. Everything’s a cadence, so you only have to learn the grammar of cadences, and now you know harmony.”

In this post and my previous one, when I say “music theory,” it is to these simplifications I am referring. Most university and online courses, plus AP Music Theory, assume this chord grammar as their starting point. It is the “core” of the theory core.

Now, in a university setting, these simplifications have many advantages:

They’re easy to teach and grade, as compressed into four semesters
They aren’t composition-specific and can be easily applied by performance and education students to their specialities
They make it easy to segment composition-focused training into different courses and semesters
They’re interesting in their own right as theory and useful as a gateway to the current, rich and vibrant academic theory discourse
They’re flexible enough to encompass contemporary vernacular styles
They’re easily contextualized with other theoretical traditions from around the world
They’re concepts that professional musicians are expected to know
Most of all, they’re sufficient for amateurs while also being serviceable in training professional musicians

So, if musicians and institutions want to focus on teaching and learning this theory, I can see and respect why.

That said, the theory core and its assumptions is neither the only or best way of training composers.

How Composers Learned Music — With Minimal Theory

For composers and musicians who want to learn “all the details” of counterpoint, for those who really want to understand how classical composers thought about music based on how they learned it, for those who want to learn music from a compositional perspective from the outset — Gjerdingen describes an alternate path in Child Composers in Old Conservatories.

This alternate pedagogical tradition began in 18th-century Italy and spread to France and Russia, where it continued into the 20th century.

Essentially, rather than centering theory, it focused on vocabulary and usage.

Students learned dozens of short contrapuntal patterns, or “schemas.” These schemas included cadence formulas but encompassed many more patterns besides.

Through hundreds of solfeggi, partimenti, dispositions, and counterpoint exercises, students learned how to

Spot these contrapuntal patterns given only single-line fragments
Recognize the patterns’ implications and affordances
Identify which fragments fit together and how they could be recombined
Order the fragments to create a convincing musical rhetoric
Embellish and disguise these fundamental structures

As Gjerdingen explains, students spent “hundreds and thousands of hours . . . working on patterns . . . and variations of things. . . . At the Paris Conservatory, they had entire pages where you’d have 20 harmonizations of the same melody or 20 harmonizations of the same bass. Those were skills that really helped developed a rich understanding of what the underlying pattern was.”

And this was the dominant pedagogical tradition that trained composers from the 18th to the early-20th centuries, including Rossini, Verdi, Rachmaninov, Debussy, Ravel — and even Berio. It’s also the tradition that the legendary Nadia Boulanger taught to her students. It further shares many common elements with the training Bach, Haydn, and Mozart received (e.g., see Nicholas Baragwanath, The Solfeggio Tradition, 22-30).

Through this training, even these composers’ second- and third-rate peers achieved a fluency in composition and counterpoint that most contemporary college graduates cannot begin to match (see Child Composers 322–23).

“But Didn’t They Know Theory?”

Now, did these musicians know and discuss theory? Generally, yes — but it was peripheral to their training in much the same way that composition is peripheral to contemporary theory instruction.

For instance, Gjerdingen explains that, at the Paris Conservatory, Rameau’s theories “never had any influence.”

“That may be a slight overstatement,” he concedes. “But [Charles] Catel, who was one of the early authors of a widely used harmony book at the Paris Conservatory, basically said, ‘Yes, there is Rameau, but we don’t deal with that.’”

Likewise, they often didn’t conceive of theory the same way we do. For example, Gjerdingen, citing C.P.E. Bach, relates that J.S. Bach “did not really buy ‘this inversion business.’”

“If you’re writing in the style of Bach,” Gjerdingen explains, “you can’t throw in any inversion of a chord in a particular instance. It’s usually a very particular version of the chord, so, from Bach’s point of view, those were different things because they were used differently.”

Gjerdingen collected many of his sources into the website partimenti.org, where interested readers can find the aforementioned “entire pages where you’d have 20 harmonizations . . . of the same bass,” among dozens of other historical documents.

What Does All This Mean in the 21st-Century

Like Gjerdingen, I would argue that these historical methods of learning composition — and their modern revivals — are NOT for everybody. Still, knowing about them provides composers an eye-opening contrast to the common, 21st-century university curriculum.

In the English-speaking world, only over the past decade or so have these pedagogical materials and strategies begun to be revived. In addition to Gjerdingen, scholars such as Nicholas Baragwanath, Job IJzerman, Giorgio Sanguinetti, Peter van Tour, and others, have been working to develop not only a clearer picture of the historical pedagogy but also its potential applications in the modern day.

Besides Gjerdingen’s website, partimenti.org, the Learn Partimento podcast is a great source for learning more about them and the scholars and musicians pursuing these threads today. (There are dozens of other good sources to which I’m happy to point interested readers.)

For me personally as a composer and a composition teacher, these historical methods and strategies are a significant inspiration, but, as I’ll describe in future posts, they are not my only influence.

What I Wish Someone Told Me about Music Theory

[Ed. — After publishing this post, I discovered that many readers were misreading my intent and were unfamiliar with the background of my critique. Accordingly, I added and tweaked several paragraphs below and wrote an additional post. New readers may want to start by reading that subsequent post, “How Composers Used To — and Could — Be Trained.”]

You may think as I did — when you took AP music theory, or completed the standard college theory core, or watched a theory video on YouTube — that you were learning how music works.

As an aspiring composer, you may have even hoped, “If I learn music theory, I’ll know how to write music.”

Unfortunately, that’s not true.

What Music Theory Actually Teaches

Unless you were unusually well-informed as a young composer and happened to win at “theory-instructor roulette” (or got deep into weeds of the grad-level theory discourse), it would be easy to infer — incorrectly — a certain set of assumptions about what theory offers.

Because learning theory involves writing and analyzing music, it is natural to assume you were learning composition on some level. Unfortunately, such assumptions often reflect more your own musical goals than they grasp the pedagogical objectives of most textbooks, university curricula, and online sources.

The music theory core, as it is commonly taught, does three things. It —

Explains staff notation and music fundamentals (e.g., meter, rhythm, intervals, scales, chords)
Describes what is normative to a specific repertoire, with an emphasis on harmony
Gives dumbed-down recipes for how to recreate those norms

For the vast majority of university and online courses, that’s about it.

Now, a few courses (typically those focused on a film music, jazz, or songwriting) do go one step further: showing you how to recreate several different musical styles.

But even when it involves some composing, learning theory is fundamentally a descriptive enterprise.

Theory mostly teaches you how to talk about music, not how to make it. This is, of course, useful, but there can be a yawning gap between understanding music conceptually versus being able to create it practically.

As Robert Gjerdingen put it, the modern university theory core is like taking a course in space exploration. You end up able to discuss the subject and perform some rudimentary tasks — but that doesn’t make you an astronaut.

The Glaring Holes in Standard Music Theory

For those hoping to learn how to write music, the common theory curriculum has some glaring holes:

Despite melody being central to much music written today, few universities or online courses rigorously teach how to write a melody. True, they often teach general melodic forms and features (e.g., sentence form and high points), but only occasionally how to create the things that go into the formal boxes and how to control their features.
Likewise, melody and accompaniment has been hands down the most common musical texture of the past 300 years, yet many theory courses never teach that skill — instead, focusing on how to write approximations of chorales.
Regarding harmony, most universities and online courses teach far less than it seems because they teach a grammar of harmony, but not a vocabulary of specific harmonic gestures and their usage. As with melody, students are then taught formal boxes that can string together these grammatical utterances. The result is like teaching someone how to make grammatically correct English words, sentences, and paragraphs — while having only the haziest understanding of what the words actually mean.
And then there’s the big elephant in the room: How does music take listeners on a journey that gives them goosebumps or takes their breath away? The common curriculum avoids the question entirely, even though solid scholarship exists on the topic.

In essence, music theory gives composers a rabbit and a hat . . .

And then expects them to figure out how to create the magic on their own (or “in a different course”).

Why Theory Training Can Leave You Frustrated

Is this theory’s fault? Of course not.

But if you don’t understand what the theory core is trying to do, it is easy to become confused and frustrated.

As a result of these misunderstandings,

You end up writing vanilla, run-of-the-mill music . . . and you don’t know how to spice things up.

Why? Because, by design, theory teaches you how to create what’s common and general, not unique and specific.

You come to believe that excellence is a result of “geniuses breaking rules.”

Why? Because when you try to break the rules you were taught, your music just sounds worse.

You feel like you’re reinventing the wheel every time you compose.

Why? Because the rules you were taught work were the equivalent of short-order recipes for specific styles. You were never taught how to make bespoke pieces in different or original styles.

You feel like your music has to sound a certain way to count as “original.”

Why? Because most composition programs replicate the same issues from the theory core of focusing on norms and recipes rather than mastering possibilities and principles. The only difference is that, instead of passing tones and augmented-sixth chords, now those recipes include pitch-class sets, multiphonics, and bowed crotales.

So if you feel frustrated as a composer . . .

If you feel like something has been missing in your musical education . . .

You are 100% correct.

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