Leaderboard

Agreed. Force yourself to experiment outside of your comfort zone. Give yourself specific parameters and constraints to streamline and focus your efforts in other directions. Harmonic, rhythmic, textural limitations will force you to use the unrestricted elements to expand on your current vocabulary and tools. ...

1) When its finished. 2) When the performers need it for rehearsals. 3) The hour of the deadline. Personally, I hate revising pieces after the fact simply because I'm a better composer after the fact than when I wrote it. Its far easier to write a new work with the better composer in you than to mix the better and poorer composers in you.

One can study real hard and write pretty good music without being gifted. One can also be gifted and write very good music without study. But one who is gifted and studies hard will write excellent music. It is not mutually exclusive, but I believe those that are not gifted won't get any further than one step above mediocre.

I'm opposite. Chamber music is for wussies. Orchestral big music is where its at!

^^WOW! If you are a disciplined composer, it is finished when you have developed you ideas as fas as you can take it. (general consensus)

Never. Just ask Schubert.

This is what this topic is about - music that you don't want to hear again. Chances are that the sole fact of answering - and doing so honestly - will create a reaction, intended or not. I just explained a kind of music that I personally dislike, and of course I knew it would have its supporters as well. Now, to point out more precisely... 1) The "intellectual snobbery" has been actually a prevailing attitude among modernists since the 1920s at least: they thought of themselves as a small vanguard leading the way, and that their arts needed to be only accessible to a select cadre of the enlightened. This way of thinking was exemplified by the early Aaron Copland (who later changed his mind) and the early Boulez (who didn't entirely). 2) Boulez's works on 'total serialism'. Ligeti himself described them as 'akin to compulsion neurosis'. And I tend to agree with him - I've been left with a positively stormy headache after every of the few times I've listened to them. 3) As for Cage's works... Come on, what did he actually compose? I think of 4'33"... (where's the composition? Any 4'33" can be classed (and copyrighted!) as a Cage work?)... And the 0'00" of "performing any disciplined action"... (that means I'm performing it by writing this sentence). Call that a philosophical statement or whatever, but not 'composing'. 'Musicircus' is fine as a joke, but can one take it seriously? Same goes for Boulez's aleatoric experiments, although at least he attempted to control some aspects. 4) As for 'rules' (I prefer to call them 'guidelines'), they are great as exercises to assimilate a particular style. But I expect to develop my own voice, whether I embrace the sonata form or the 12-tone technique (or both!)... This pretty much sums up my views. Of course nobody's bounded by them - this are just my views :) ...