Choosing Style

What makes you choose what you're going to write?

I see everything from noise collages to historical styles on this site - what makes you pick the style?

"Content dictates form" ~Stephen Sondheim

I write the music that I think sounds the best and will express my ideas the most efficiently.

I never "picked a style". Why should one even worry about "styles"? I write what interests me personally as a composer, regardless of how it might be labelled. Composing consists of making lots and lots of individual artistic decisions and I feel just "following a style" (even one you have founded yourself) is some kind of cop-out to avoid this, which I find dubitable. Just my opinion.

"Content dictates form" ~Stephen Sondheim

I think this is a bit of a "what was first, chicken or egg" question. On one hand, yes, the "essence" of a composition precedes its concrete acoustic form, i.e. the musical idea in the mind of the composer comes first. On the other hand no content can exist without a form, i.e. a piece of music must first have a concrete form before it can obtain "meaning" as music.

That's also a question of semantics, of course, since it's not clear to me what's meant with "content" in art in the first place. Especially if used as a contrast to "form", as the form of a piece of music might very well be it's true essence/content. Maybe this is even always the case.

In any case I got to disagree with Sondheim. For me, a piece always starts out with form. There is no content prior to that.

"Content dictates form" ~Stephen Sondheim

Except when otherwise :P Plus Sondheim is a bit too self-quoting for me to take him seriously.

I write the music that I think sounds the best and will express my ideas the most efficiently.

Maybe a better question would be what dictates what - if you have a fragment of an idea that is x, what draws you to y compositional choice?

I never "picked a style". Why should one even worry about "styles"? I write what interests me personally as a composer, regardless of how it might be labelled. Composing consists of making lots and lots of individual artistic decisions and I feel just "following a style" (even one you have founded yourself) is some kind of cop-out to avoid this, which I find dubitable. Just my opinion.

That's not exactly what I mean - but what makes you pick say, a straight feel over a 55/12 rhythm, especially with computer forms that can actually play stuff like that? Maybe a better way to put it is what draws you to certain compositional choices?

For me--and for how I take that quote--it might be a little different, as I write musicals and cabaret music. I have a song called "Chance to Say Goodbye" which I wrote for a friend who passed away in a car accident. (Really morbid, but the best example I can think of to describe... sorry!)

So, when I started writing the song, I thought, "I want to write a song saying goodbye to my friend who died." There's my content. What the piece will be about. From there I go on to write the song, and find out how that material wants to sing.

On a grander scale, if I'm approaching a larger theatrical project, I'll think about how I want to approach it. My friend wrote a short story called "Rupert the Lonely Pony"--a tongue-in-cheek parody of children's stories. In adapting it, I decide that my musical should likewise be a tongue-in-cheek parody of children's musicals. Whereas I have another project, adapting an epic play by a modern American playwright (can't go into much detail, sorry). Because of the epic scope of the play and the Americana themes, I think, "This should be a jazz opera in the vein of Street Scene or Porgy and Bess." Once again, content dictates form.

So, for me as a musical dramatist--since the original post asked how each of us personally finds a style--the content [what I'm writing about] will dictate the form [how I go about writing it]. I don't do this because Stephen Sondheim says so, I just happen to agree with him.

Yeah, I see what you mean. Neat :)

The Ensemble Sospeso - Wolfgang Rihm

question 2 on that page.

Great link as always, Juji :)

I write the music that I think sounds the best and will express my ideas the most efficiently.

i whole-heartedly agree.

i would like to add that the my music has to make sense, at least to myself. it doesnt always mean following rules, it just means i know what im doing.