Leaderboard

... if it first finds its way into the hearts of publishers or other people who can advocate for it. i've listened lately to (and even tried to play some of) a lot of really good music that has either been entirely forgotten, or was entirely forgotten until 20/40/60 years ago when a young and very passionate musicology grad/conductor/historically-informed performance specialist got a hold of it. and classical listeners still seem to prefer collecting 40 different recordings of mahler's fifth. it's kind of a shame really. anyway, OP, if you feel good about the supposedly "derivative" music you write, i don't see the problem. if you think being derivative is in itself a problem, there's not much you can do about it except put more effort into developing your musical imagination—if you have a strong personality and well-defined musical preferences, it'll naturally come through in your music, whereas if you're a mercurial eclectic, consciously experiment with different things and attempt to break new ground with each piece. (compare Schubert and Dussek, or Mahler and R. Strauss.*) * A note on these examples—yes, the judgment of history holds Schubert and Mahler to be the greater composers, but that arises from a system of value judgment that holds "stylistic fingerprints" in unduly high regard. EG without a characteristic turn of phrase/harmony/predilection for contrapuntal writing/etc a composer is somehow considered less "original". While this form of historiography continued well into the twentieth century—drink every time you see the apologia "a highly individual/personal use of the twelve-tone system", or a description of a composer as "uncompromising", in a history of twentieth-century music—it has begun to be questioned today with the rediscovery/increasing stock value of composers like Dussek, Girolamo Frescobaldi, Carl Nielsen, Ferruccio Busoni etc, who put less effort into cultivating individual voices than into experimenting with different styles and methods of composition. Certainly the lasting influence of John Cage, who would probably be rather offended to have an individual style ascribed to him, on contemporary composers has shown that "visionaries" can be as important as the "craftsmen" traditionally revered (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart) wrt the trends of their day and age.

You're aware that most European states (okay, so not Greece) will offer anybody with sufficient qualifications from free state education a place at university either through a student loan or, better still if you're Scandinavian, state funded right up to doctoral level? Money is not really an issue until it comes to getting work out of it. 'Talent': along with 'tolerance', a weasel word for our times. Means somebody who is percieved to possess a special superpower in some kind of entertainment form, this resulting from varying ratios of successful study to the ignorance of the observer. Anyway, to address the point, I find a deliciously postmodern thing to do is to intentionally set out to sound like somebody else and then, well, distort it a bit. Mahler was already doing this with all the 'horror marches' and 'broken waltzes' in his symphones (Charles Ives too, but in a different way), and the Second Viennese School then carried on the experiments via Shostakovich until we arrive at something like Berio's brilliant Sinfonia and avant garde works using 'found' materials. I'm starting to find that my compositional mission is very much involved with re-casting past forms and ideas into modern 'clothes'...

As a rule, I'm always skeptical of composers using the word 'organic' to promote their cause.