Dimitrije Mandić

My sincerest congratulations to treehugger1995 for giving exactly the kind of advice we need, a.k.a. an advice based on personal subjective opinion, instead of arguing that any opinion is more objective or valuable than another! :) After all, any debate on objectivity of essence, if built upon even slightly scientific grounds, requires a rational theme in order to produce rationally useful results, and I think we'll agree neither music or true values are rational. That means any conclusively rational explanations of the true nature and values of music - are impossible. :)

Actually, it's both. I was looking for a thread about solving any kinds of composers' psychological problems, found this one, and decided to post in it rather than start a nigh-identical discussion in a separate thread (after all, forum admins speaking in the name of forums usually tell you to try to find the answers you need in existing threads, precisely so you don't go unknowingly posting duplicates and so the original threads stay useful!), all the while not noticing any displayed dates at all, not by a long shot! :D

I must disagree with you here. I don't think you can completely avoid producing what you've already heard, it's just that it's only really worth if it's a part of you and your intuition. That's how I see it. J. S. Bach is my favourite composer, for the record. :phones: And yes, he does seem to make anything however tonal or modal sound great, because it's a part of his craftsmanship skill, which he masterfully embodies in his fugues and other polyphonic forms, producing works full of vast content and architectural beauty that reaches to us even today! He repeats himself persistently and constantly through the smallest details even inside just phrases of every work he composes, and that's why I like his music so much! He gives me the feeling I really can use my not too advanced theoretical and constructional knowledge to maximum effect after all. When composing fugues, I almost never feel I need to go beyond relatively simple tonality, even less beyond tonality as a whole! What I do feel I need to go beyond, however, are the formal limitations we've been taught in the middle school. No one taught us all the ways to break them. Even just some of these ways would've already been most helpful. I'm arguing that, once you get a firm grasp of any traditional musical concept (such as (the aforementioned) harmony up to the early Romantic period), rules surrounding it start strangling your creativity if you must follow them, if it's your job to, like mine was of a pupil. So, it's not the simplicity that troubles me, it's the rules and regulations that, once removed, wouldn't harm the quality of music in any way. Whether my intuition leads me towards the clarity and simplicity of Baroque and Classical periods, or towards the vast richness and complexity of Romantic and post-Romantic waters, is an entirely different matter, in my humble opinion. In any case, thanks for all your advice! Please don't get me wrong, of course I do believe there is true, natural quality in the emotion of everything generally dogmatic as Classical, be it music or other arts, and I'm sorry if I hadn't made it clear already. That understood, I'd like to tackle a different problem. I want to say that anyone who knows my abilities and achievements as a pupil of a music middle school (including the professors there, cross my heart and hope to die) can tell you that I mastered all the basics and rules that were taught there quicker than it had been planned in the schedule of the learning programme, even though I can seem slow in execution of some exercises due to frequently triple-double-checking everything in my search for the absolute best solutions, no matter what (it can get a bit obsessive at times, but I don't think that's the main point, given that I confess often being a greater perfectionist than I should be). Naturally, I have always felt the need to go beyond my own knowledge (and that applies to the situation in discussion here), but since no one ever stopped by to help me with that, most of the time I just felt awful being practically forced to suffocate on my hunger for inspiration and creativity, because I was limited to learning as so much as EVERYONE ELSE had yet to learn well. No one ever put an effort to teach advanced material to advanced learners! And their excuse was always that I'd have a chance to learn it all as a student of a faculty, yet here string players are being denied of any real kind of composing, conducting, or orchestrating practices by the programme, all their learning careers; and in faculty this extends to HARMONY and COUNTERPOINT of all! There is a slight fortunate exception in that the formal and harmonic analysis is separated from these disciplines, but it's all still already miserable for anyone here who really wants to improve, and even more so for those who are aiming for the world-class level of musical competence. And before you ask, no, you can't study composition in Niš, and it would've been too much at once for someone as inexperienced and as used to somewhat unambitious standards as myself. The only problem I can see here is that the choice of a type of work entirely also requires inspiration, and so do real quality formal solutions, but I feel your advice will come to be most helpful to me nevertheless! Thank you very much!

I've got issues concerning consistency and flow while composing. All of my compositions are actually just starting ideas, and it's not that I don't possess the technique (on the contrary, I'm attending the Faculty of Arts in Niš, Serbia right now, first year violinist), but I just can't conjure anything further from the start! Nothing inspiring ever comes to mind, and nothing I try to continue by thinking alone really satisfies me! It's like I can't unleash my talent, and it only keeps popping up very occasionally in small fragments. If I try to force myself into continuing to compose these same bits after a pause of any length, I end up looking at the score cluelessly with a different emotion that won't suit it well like the first inital one would, had it continued there and then by my virtue. And no, I don't really adore minimalist music, and not being able to conceive lengthier ideas is equal to surrendering and submitting to one's lack of mindpower and creative abilities, in my opinion. This apparent lack of inspiration may be due to the lack of quality in the contemporary commercial music, or it may be not; but the point remains. Also, what bothers me extremely is the fact that know only how to play violin and bass guitar well. My piano skills are those of an elementary music school second-grader at best, and no other instrument I even know how to touch lends such a freedom in both melodic and harmonic improvisation. My own instrument doesn't help there much more: though my improvisation skills are much greater with violin than any other instrument, I'm still way too technique-dependent, because there are limits such as the number of the strings/notes played at once (darn you, unobtainable Bach/Vega/Baroque bow!), and the size of one's left hand (a.k.a. stretching abilities); furthermore, the tuning itself is hopelessly stuck to the fifths, and is not really to be experimented with, mainly because of the physical limits of the strings as well (and there is really very little musical equipment in Serbia, comparing even to average European standards, I'd say). It's just no good here after all.They're choking all the talented minds here by offering to teach just low-level, extremely boring technical knowledge of handling the SATB by using harmonic resources only up to and including those used in the early Romantic era; and of composing inventions and fugues, again, by using those same completely uninspiring harmonic resources. In the end, I improvise and "almost compose" best by singing (sometimes the violin helps me too). The problem is, when I'm just unwinding melodies like that, I'm not entirely conscious of them (because I'm usually doing something else on my PC while it's happening), and I end up not really remembering any of it. The only thing I could do is try to record these melody-storming sessions, since it just wouldn't be anything like it if I went thinking about it all (and it would kinda violate at least a part of the definition of 'improvisation'). Any advices regarding this would be very appreciated, and I'm pretty sure it's got to do with some fears of mine after all. Thanks in advance! P.S. I use programmes such as Anvil Studio, Guitar Pro 5 and Sibelius 5 and 6 to write my music down, and despite being an excellent student ever since I started going to both music and regular elementary schools, I'm not too rich in life experiences (but I am only 18, so I guess there'll be plenty of it yet to come).