The Realms of Gold

Good idea, I like it.

I'm terrified of composing. I love it, more than anything, but the process scares me. I look at a blank page of staff paper and want to go hide in my favorite book or the refrigerator or anything mindless. It's because, I think, I'm afraid of what will happen once I get to the end of writing down whatever two measures I've got running through my head. Einstein was right when he said, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" -- I've realized that for most of a piece, you can't rely on intuition alone, but instead you have to decide how the piece goes. Reminding myself of that has helped me write beyond whatever bits invent themselves in my mind's ear, but forcing myself to stick with it for the first few minutes (while the fear is prevalent) is still hard. I'm coming out of a composition slump, maybe that has something to do with it. Because it's gotten much better over the last couple of months, but for now it's still there. My suitemate at college and I share this problem -- he's got it with writing papers. Anybody else experience it with composition?

It's been a long time since I read that book, but this quote, which I somehow remembered, hit me the other day when I realized that, for all I've learned in school, nobody ever stood up there and said, "This is what Mahler did when he felt like writing a half-hour movement of an hour-and-a-half symphony." Writing a minute of music is easy. Themes are easy. Development is hard. Let's say you have a theme, and you want to elaborate on it and the current musical feeling before moving on to another section with its own theme. You extend the last measures of the theme into a little bit of development, but that lasts a half-minute at most. Whenever I feel like I need more time -- say, four or five minutes -- to express a point musically, there comes that one measure when I need to start writing non-thematic material, the real "stuff" of development. I feel like development is actually not really based on the theme before it at all, except for the transition. It's just material of its own, less thematic, developmental in character but more like a stream of consciousness. I find that sort of thing really difficult to write. I don't know how much to allude to existing themes, how much repetition in sequences to use before it gets boring, how to know when a rhythmic or melodic or harmonic-system change is safe to make or too jarring for the moment. I'm working right now on a symphonic poem in six contiguous movements, projected at more than a half hour, I expect, and I'm really interested in your guys' answers: how do you write a long-form movement? How do you write a long-form piece?

You should also be extremely careful about your decision to apply to a conservatory or a liberal arts school. If you're interested in things besides music, don't be scared by the concept of a school where you'll have to take a few classes outside of music! In my senior year of high school, I nearly broke down and applied to conservatory. My parents knocked some sense into me and reminded me I love things besides music. Now I'm a music major at a liberal arts college, happy with all my classes, music and otherwise. If I were at a conservatory, I'd probably shoot myself. So consider wisely what will work better for you.

Oh, and Nikolas's post is really good. I'll add one thing: Critiquers: don't be harsh. Critiquees: don't take the truth as harsh. If something isn't good, you ought to know, right? If you don't know, you can't improve -- but the upside is, as you get better, you get so much better at seeing the faults as you write.

I wanted to read the whole topic, but then I realized it was 32 pages long, so I'll just respond to the first post like I bet everybody else did :toothygrin: I had a self-driven, ever-accelerating exposure to advanced art music once I got into college and started taking music classes. In about three months I realized that almost everything I'd written over the past four years -- not all of it, but most -- was complete crap compared to what I wanted to be writing. Because I was so rapidly forcing myself to advance, my compositional skills lagged far behind my exposure and theoretical/analytical training. I not only got used to criticism, both from myself and my teachers, I began to look for it. Remember that Family Guy episode where Stewie tries to get Lois to beat him? That's me, kind of :P Sounds lame, but I want so desparately to close the gap between my listening and my writing experience that I tell my profs up front to lay on the criticism as honestly as they can. And honest criticism isn't about self-deprecation. No profs ever told me "you're no good" or anything of the sort. They have told me things, however, like: And then a seminar-room-full of young composition students nods their heads, and it feels great. I'll admit, this kind of criticism might sound a little harsh because of the imbalance of compliment with critique. But if I had people telling me this stuff four years ago, I might have saved a lot of time. So my theory on criticism is: As long as you're not mean, honest and complete criticism is crucial and therefore inherently nice. Inconsiderate bashing is the worst thing you can do. Criticizing honestly, completely, and in detail, and suggesting improvements, are the nicest things you can do. And for those of us receiving criticism (once I post stuff, bring it on!) -- from experience I've learned that it's always possible, and often likely, that your piece has a decent portion of suck mixed in with the good. This doesn't mean it all sucks, or that you suck. It means, if you can hear the suck, that you're already getting better.