Bibasis

So you don't play an instrument and you say to yourself that you "suck"??... :horrified:

How do you mean this? Are these words advices for me? I already play the pianoforte.

To write a piano concerto which is properly orchestrated, notated and playable for all instruments... And to explore and develop non-tonal, more modern possibilities of composition.

I still have the abovementioned problem. Really annoying... It works fine, however, when I am logged in. Is this a trick to keep away non-members? :veryunsure:

This is a good question! Needless to say, that I would not compose if I would not get inspiration from the masters! Sometimes it starts off with a look in the scores of a certain piece I liked, then it continues with some little changes, e. g. I take a melody from the masters and rewrite it or I use a harmonic progression I found in one of the masters' works. Sometimes, good genuine ideas emerge from that process. Sometimes, I just try to compose "in the spirit" of a particular piece or well-known composer, e.g. in the spirit of Scott Joplin and Jelly-Roll Morton, or Chopin, or Mozart. Often, these attempts fail, but even then I often end up with some ideas I can use in other pieces. I hope this provides an answer to your question, although I couldn't really name specific pieces.

As Sarastro has already pointed out, you don't seem to have a clear understanding of the term "philosophy", und that makes your statements somewhat messy. "Philosophy" is not - as you seem to imply in your last post - a bundle of unconscious aesthetic or ethic values, but a process of consciously checking the validity and cogency of arguments and theories. Philosophers have thought a lot about music, what you can see if you read Plato (Republic), or Kierkegaard (Either-Or), or Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation) and Nietzsche (The Birth of the Tragedy) and various writings of Adorno. On the other hand, some composers have also been influenced by the philosophers of their time to a certain degree (but perhaps not as strongly as the other way around, and it would be difficult to locate these influences in their music). This would indeed be an interesting topic, but probably too extensive to be discussed here. And now it comes to my mind that there are even some men who were both philosophers and composers: Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Adorno. If you really want to learn more about the contemporary philosophy of music, I recommend to start by reading the following article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is really up-to-date: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/music/

When I am not logged in and try to access any music content (e. g.: http://www.youngcomp...ello-concertino ) with my browser (the newest version of Firefox), the following error appears: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'GROUP BY reviews.comment_author ORDER BY IF((COUNT(reviews.comment_a' at line 6 When I am logged in, I can access the content without any problems. Anyone else with that error, or any ideas what could cause it?

@.fseventsd: This is an interesting aspect. I wasn't really aware that the question of composing with piano is intertwined with the question of composing with music software. But it's true, of course! The composition with music software which is so common nowadays may also result in a decline of the inner musical imagination of some composers (and the inability to get an impression of how written music would sound). @Sarastro: Thanks for this insight into your technique of composition and your very substantial contribution to the topic. P.S. It is interesting that such a great composer as Berlioz never learned to play the piano. Quote from Wikipedia: "As a result of his father's discouragement, he [berlioz] never learned to play the piano, a peculiarity he later described as both beneficial and detrimental."

Departing from a discussion on Sarastro's art song "There and back again", I would like to discuss the question of composing with (or without) the aid of the piano. A historical retrospection might shed some light on the topic: Someone like Ravel regarded the piano as an essential aid for music composition. He used it to discover "new sounds". Others, like Weber and Berlioz, have warned composers to make too much use of the piano when composing because it would make the ideas conventional and result in something which is rather an improvisation than a composition. (I have read this somewhere in the book "Music, the Brain and Ecstasy" by Robert Jourdain, but don't ask me where exactly.) I personally use the piano very rarely for compositions. Sometimes I use ideas for compositions from improvisations on the piano, but the process of composing is different from that. What do you think? Does composition benefit or suffer from the use of a piano? This might even lead to the more general question of what your technique of composition is. I'm curious about your contributions. :)