I had an interesting group meeting with my composition
students yesterday. The main theme of the meeting seemed to be frustration.
Some students work primarily in digital media, but are interested in creating
music to be performed by live musicians on traditional acoustic instruments –
they’re frustrated by the limitations of those instruments, and the notation
they read. Some are primarily acoustic instrumentalists who are interested in
using notation software as a compositional tool – they’re frustrated by the
steep learning curve of the software, and the notational mistakes that the
software still allows them to make. Before this meeting, I’d spent a lot of
time thinking about the issues that my composition students have brought to my
attention in recent years in broad sweeping terms – what my work with what I
call “digital-first” composers has meant to my internal definitions of what
constitutes musical literacy, how I might help students from the digital world
compose effectively for acoustic media and vice versa, etc. However, after this
meeting, I came back to some hard truths about composition that I hadn’t
pondered for a long time:
1) Imagining new
music is easy (well, relatively easy).
2) Bringing it into
the world is hard, and takes skills.
3) Mastering those
skills takes work.
Lots of us have great ideas for new music in our minds – a little
snippet of something, or a big extended something. Bringing the music out into
the world is a different matter, and happens for different people in different
ways. Whatever your way happens to be, if you want to bring the music into the
world as you imagined it, you have to have a set of deep skills to make that
happen. If you’re creating stuff for digital media, you have to have deep
knowledge of your digital audio workstation in order to bring your imagined
music into the world exactly as you imagined it. If you’re creating stuff for
you to perform, you have to have deep knowledge of your performing medium. If
you’re creating stuff for other people to perform, you have to have deep
knowledge of both their performing media and the language in which they want
your compositional intent communicated to them. If there’s something you want
to use as a tool to help you in your compositional work, you need to have deep
knowledge of how that tool works, too. Developing each set of deep skills takes
time, dedication, and concentration, and the skills don’t necessarily cross
over – in my case, for example, my experience as an acoustic composer is no
substitute for DAW knowledge when I’m creating music for digital media.
It’s actually taken me several hours of thought and false
starts to get to that simple statement, and I imagine that my future posts will
follow up on some of those false starts, but I think this is a good place for
me to start this whole blogging adventure. Whatever else I might think or say
about composing music, it’s important to acknowledge that parts of it are
flat-out difficult, and require skills, knowledge, and hard work.
