How does music reflect a composer's personality?

But still, it has to come from somewhere, and it's filtered through your personality and past experience in the process of writing. If you're a precocious, joyous young Mozart, you're almost certainly not ready to write the Requiem Mass.

I'm not so sure. I think a young composer can gain an understanding of the compositional processes that may imply a deep understanding of human emotion, but does not neccassarily have to understand what those emotional qualities (in the eyes of the audience) will be.

If I listen to music that to my ears sounds emotionally disconnected, it wouldn't be fair to say that this is a reflection of the composer's (lack of) personality, (or a completely different personality than my own).

I find that I write whatever I like to hear. Which in some cases is Eric Whitacre (only not quite as cool, of course)...

Music is very much a personality thing. In my case, music is either a reflection of the way I think, or a way to help me think (if there's a difference).

I'm not so sure. I think a young composer can gain an understanding of the compositional processes that may imply a deep understanding of human emotion, but does not neccassarily have to understand what those emotional qualities (in the eyes of the audience) will be.

If I listen to music that to my ears sounds emotionally disconnected, it wouldn't be fair to say that this is a reflection of the composer's (lack of) personality, (or a completely different personality than my own).

this is good intuition, except it would be hard to say what is understanding of the compositional processes that may imply a deep understanding of human emotion

, but any composer knowing (or assuming that he knows) the audience and its musical taste could fake emotions (or rather the cultural coding of them as was previous to his writing the music) which is what most movie, game (incidental) and pop music composers/producers do. of course, it still begs the question as to what is fake and what is real (emotion), so i'd rather tend to think that it's not 'emotion' (as sad, happy and so on) composer is seeking to provoke with his music, but thought (which is when 'my fater has died' becomes very rich with its implications on the general being of a human and which would be harder to encode in compositional language without experiencing what does 'my father died' means to one and if it really means supposed emotions one ascribes to others having when thing like that happens).

I think it's difficult to map one's personality to one's musical output. I suppose another question would be, can something be said about one's musical personality? This relates to signature traits that uniquely identifies the music with the composer.

of course, because happy people may not be happy with being happy. or happy people may be pretending being happy. or being happy is not personal or subjective property at all.

wow... thats a lot of happy.

Anyways... When i first began composing, i would sit down and try to convey an emotion or feeling and the piece would sound too artificial. My music sounded exactly like i was trying to convey an emotion but i was unable to convince myself or listeners that i had really illustrated the emotion in music. However, I have come to a point where i do not write to convey emotions but simply sit at my piano or play my guitar, drums, marimba etc.. and i find that my emotions come out naturally. I have been told by my classmates and friends that my music lately is very representative of myself and communicates easily with listeners.

I believe that a composer writes his or her music based not necessarily on personality, but on what they want to portray. I don't mean so in the manner that the said composer sits down and thinks, hey, I'm sad so I'm going to write a sad piece now, but in the sense that said composer sits down and creates what they truly yearn to show to the listener, or what said composer really, truly feels in his or her soul.

Of course, I'm certainly not denying that other factors affect compositions. But take Shostakovich: While we can probably agree that he wanted to be happy all of the time, just like anybody else, could he really deny his anger, sorrow, and hate towards the atrocities he knew of?

I do not claim to know for sure as much as I have stated, but I try to understand just what in the plague is going on.