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Thanks, Ken. I wasn't familiar with the Symphony of Psalms, so I just went and gave it a listen. Boy! That's very Stravinsky-ish! Thanks for introducing me to that!

Thanks for the review I'll make it better

The difficulty is that when trying to be original, you have no control over what your contemporaries are doing. Ideas don't appear out of a vacuum. We are all the products of our cumulative experiences. So it's very likely that the same influences that nudge you towards writing a certain kind of music are acting on other composers in the same way. There are a LOT of people on the planet at this point in history, and it ends up being a numbers game. And today we live in a globally connected world. We don't have the comfort of long periods of musical isolation from the neighboring cathedral towns or royal courts while we gather our thoughts and develop our ideas. If you're working on it, someone else is going to hear about it. If someone else is working on it, it's hard to stop their ideas from leaking into your inner soundscape. We also have no control over what happens after us. Trying to strategize the best direction for your music now, in the context of music history two hundred years from now, is a pretty impossible task. If you've got the foresight to solve that one, can you please stop pursuing composing and sort out world peace instead? What seems original now may completely miss the boat for what ends up being significant. I say, just write what you like. One of the best predictors of being important to the direction of music in your time is to write enough music to get good, and to get good enough to be performed, filed away in music libraries, and passed around to other musicians so you can influence other people. If you hate what you are writing, you won't be able to stick around long enough to get good. You'll quit before you get started. So compose music that you find moving, don't quit to spend your free time watching TV, and if you are very lucky, you may stumble on something original enough to move the gears of progress a notch.

It would. It's mono thematic. I think of Stravinsky's Symphony Of Psalms in contrast where he simply wrote Hallelujah for the choir to sing. But maybe that was more for musical punctuation.

Yikes. If you never learn something crucial to the creation of the canon, you're missing out on a huge portion of the whole, in this case the musical era you're currently living in. While I personally am not a huge fan of the Galant sound, you'd better believe I busted my ass understanding how it works. And besides, people already have a sense of when pushing a boundary goes too far in a given instance. The Beatles's Revolution 9 stained the White Album for the longest time. I agree with the second portion of this statement, but not the first. People have a tendency to take art too seriously, looking for meaning and praising its contributions to the development of the genre as a whole. While I personally think it's kind of wasted effort on their part, I don't think it stems from any knowledgable preference. Ask most people and they'll tell you they don't like Country/Rap/Classical/etc. and be unable to say why. I hate it when people praise something for being "ahead of its time", because they look at things outside what makes the art good in the first place. Succinct, and I think the best way to sum this whole thing up, personally. It's no good to rush through the learning process; things take time to form expertise and that's okay.

@Mark101 Great point! I think individual preferences is what makes art exactly that: an art. Nobody corners the market on the definition of beauty; in my opinion, the best artists are the most versatile—those who can adapt and write to many different audiences. @Mark101 I must also agree with this. If our end goal is simply to be original, then we miss out on so much of the journey! Hopefully, if we're doing it right, originality will be a byproduct of our craft. I like to think, in the future, folks will be able to hear my music and go, "Oh, that's a Brazeal. You can tell because of [variable x, y, z]." @aMusicComposer Right on! I am perhaps proclaiming my ignorance here, but all (hyperbolic language: I mean a lot of) atonal music sounds the same to me. I usually have to listen for specific instrumentation to have some hope of identifying the composer. (Oh, it uses an ondes Martenot—must be a Messiaen.) @KJthesleepdeprived Very well-put, and I agree wholeheartedly! I'm also not "musically educated," although I've heard it said if you don't get a musical education you're uninformed, and if you get a musical education you're misinformed. (Ok, not entirely true, but you see my point.) @KJthesleepdeprived Good to know we speak the same language! 😉