Composing With Or Without Piano?

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. :)

If you ever press the "play back" button while working on something in a digital scorewriter, you are composing with a piano. The only difference is that the once-essential keyboard skills are now obsolete (and with them comes a noticeable decline in the playability & quality of orchestration in amateur composers' works)

I could not compose without a piano. I would start out improvising and exploring at the piano, and come up with some harmonic gimmick, which is paired with some pianistic gimmick. Normally I would stick to certain chord classes or some general system, to keep a certain coherence, but if either by chance or systematic exploration I stumble upon some harmony outside the main system that I like, I keep it. (That said, my initial piano explorations are not random and aimless, I usually have a more or less vague preconception of the kind of sound I want to get, or some general harmonic systems I want to use, but I'm prepared for whatever unexpected find it might come up).

Once the improvisational exploration is done and the sounds and textures, and certain core ideas are internalized, I compose (i.e. organize the material) outside the piano. In this stage my piano writing gets refined; I mean, when improvising, I tend to use some stock gestures and textures, but when processing on paper, I realize things that I can modify, notes that I can add to the texture, motifs that I can switch around and stuff like that. The writing becomes richer and less mediated by mechanical favorite gestures. Then I go back to the piano to test out, then back to paper or notation software until happy.

Now, I am a pianist and write almost exclusively for piano and solo instrument (very rarely for piano solo), so the use of piano is essential for me to guarantee playability and idiomatic writing. If writing for an ensemble of melodic instruments (or orchestra) I think I would still use the piano to come up with general ideas, not as detailed as when writing for the piano, because otherwise the music will sound like piano music, only orchestrated, and no like idiomatic music for the instruments involved.

To sum up:

I agree with Ravel: Piano is an essential tool for me to come up with "new sounds" (at least, new for me), which have built-in textures and idimomatic pianistic effects. I also agree with Berlioz and Weber: It is something I have noticed myself; I tend to use certain favorite harmonies or patterns or pianistic gestures when exploring at the piano, resulting in conventional, and a bit barebones writing (because I'm not much of a virtuoso, so the things I can naturally play are not very technically interesting or demanding). Also, my crude improvisations seldom have a proper structure. My solution is to play as much piano music as I can, to stimulate my pianistic inventiveness, and also to refine and organize the material on paper or screen.

Advanced keyboard skills are perhaps not very critical if not writing for the piano nowadays, since as .fseventsd has pointed out, notation software with playback capabilities gives the composer roughly the same kind of feedback as harmonic and melodic exploration at the piano. Computer performance can be very misleading, though, and might not work well in real life (the orquestration issues .fseventsd mentioned). I have also noticed that composers without solid keyboard skills, when writing for the piano relying on software, either write banal and conventional things to be safe, or write outlandish and unnatural music (if playable at all), or something that sounds nice on computer but would not work in a real piano, or do not use the piano to its full potential, or something. There are some exceptions to be seen in this site, though, and the converse is also true (i.e. a good pianist can write insipid or badly structured piano music; piano skills and composing skills do not necessarly overlap).

@.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."

As someone with no keyboard skills whatsoever, I'd say that the only disadvantage has been that I'm only just starting to come to grips with composing effectively for piano and it still doesn't come naturally to me. However, I tend to use the guitar as a compositional tool in much the same way as I would imagine that a pianist would use a piano. I find that when I compose with my guitar, the material seems to have a much more natural flow about it than when I compose with notation software but there is the danger of falling into the trap of familiar finger patterns and quickly losing any sense of purpose.

On the other hand, composing solely using notation programs has a tendency to lead to mechanical musical decisions. I would like to do an experiment one time with all of the music uploaded to this site to see how many pieces are in 4/4 at 100bpm in the key of C. I think there would be a correlation between the number of pieces and the number of Sibelius users. I think I agree with Sarastro that it is best to improvise some ideas with an instrument then take them away and refine them on paper/notation software. That way you get a good mix between natural flow and rational structure.

As for someone who has been playing it for so many years, so many that he can not recall the exact amount, I prefer to start there. That is where I write my basic ideas down. It is easier if i go to the Piano with a blank page and ask myself: "Okay now what are we going to write today?" Now this may encompass many more questions about mood, textures, harmonic sequences, thematic writing and orcherstration, but it will always start with a basic idea and go from there. On the other, I can do it with out the need for the Piano, for I am that good. One day while in college i was composing a an brief draft of something and one of friends noted this and she asked why, my answer: For fun.

I could not compose without a piano. I would start out improvising and exploring at the piano, and come up with some harmonic gimmick, which is paired with some pianistic gimmick. Normally I would stick to certain chord classes or some general system, to keep a certain coherence, but if either by chance or systematic exploration I stumble upon some harmony outside the main system that I like, I keep it. (That said, my initial piano explorations are not random and aimless, I usually have a more or less vague preconception of the kind of sound I want to get, or some general harmonic systems I want to use, but I'm prepared for whatever unexpected find it might come up).

Once the improvisational exploration is done and the sounds and textures, and certain core ideas are internalized, I compose (i.e. organize the material) outside the piano. In this stage my piano writing gets refined; I mean, when improvising, I tend to use some stock gestures and textures, but when processing on paper, I realize things that I can modify, notes that I can add to the texture, motifs that I can switch around and stuff like that. The writing becomes richer and less mediated by mechanical favorite gestures. Then I go back to the piano to test out, then back to paper or notation software until happy.

Now, I am a pianist and write almost exclusively for piano and solo instrument (very rarely for piano solo), so the use of piano is essential for me to guarantee playability and idiomatic writing. If writing for an ensemble of melodic instruments (or orchestra) I think I would still use the piano to come up with general ideas, not as detailed as when writing for the piano, because otherwise the music will sound like piano music, only orchestrated, and no like idiomatic music for the instruments involved.

To sum up:

I agree with Ravel: Piano is an essential tool for me to come up with "new sounds" (at least, new for me), which have built-in textures and idimomatic pianistic effects. I also agree with Berlioz and Weber: It is something I have noticed myself; I tend to use certain favorite harmonies or patterns or pianistic gestures when exploring at the piano, resulting in conventional, and a bit barebones writing (because I'm not much of a virtuoso, so the things I can naturally play are not very technically interesting or demanding). Also, my crude improvisations seldom have a proper structure. My solution is to play as much piano music as I can, to stimulate my pianistic inventiveness, and also to refine and organize the material on paper or screen.

Advanced keyboard skills are perhaps not very critical if not writing for the piano nowadays, since as .fseventsd has pointed out, notation software with playback capabilities gives the composer roughly the same kind of feedback as harmonic and melodic exploration at the piano. Computer performance can be very misleading, though, and might not work well in real life (the orquestration issues .fseventsd mentioned). I have also noticed that composers without solid keyboard skills, when writing for the piano relying on software, either write banal and conventional things to be safe, or write outlandish and unnatural music (if playable at all), or something that sounds nice on computer but would not work in a real piano, or do not use the piano to its full potential, or something. There are some exceptions to be seen in this site, though, and the converse is also true (i.e. a good pianist can write insipid or badly structured piano music; piano skills and composing skills do not necessarly overlap).

You forget something here....listz who wrote outlandish things could play his own works too.

Composing without a piano, or sequencer to hear immediate feedback, is such an abstract endeavor that I don't do it. There are some guys good enough and quick enough to do it on paper, or Finale. But I've got to hear it, test it out, weigh the options. Mistakes occur and sometimes these are gold. But you will never know if you can't hear them.

Chopin, Ravel, Debussy composed with a piano because their music was idiomatically pianistic. Simple. Stravinsky always composed with a piano, and I've read that it was not always in tune. Hmm, makes you think. If he were alive today, I think he'd be using a sequencer, but who knows?

I know this. Sometimes you need a basic blueprint for a piece and the piano is perfectly suited for that. Even piano music can be morphed into most anything. It's just a tool.

Rubinstein gives the greatest suggestion to all of his students at the Moscow Conservatory. Mainly, to avoid as much as possible using the piano while composing.

'Avoiding' one way or the other sounds like purist garbage to me...the end result is music, and it was created, one way or the other.  Technical ability on a piano, limits me - but with playback, I'm not limited to that.

How each person uses is it is a personal process - some use it wisely, some don't. Having playback might stifle someone who doesn't push themselves...but then again, it might help them push themselves, as their skill improves, as they learn overall.  For instance - I think playback is another ear training tool, combined with traditional methods...intervallic, as well as the coloring.  *shrugs*

I don't think it is good to generalize, anyways.  Composing vs. improvising...vs...a blend of the two.  Whichever works best - not all people learn the same, not all people work the same, or play...it is up to each individual to find what works for them.  Again, why generalize?

But, since it was brought up - I would bet that a -much- higher percentage of composers throughout time, wrote/scribbled at the piano, and then orchestrated it after...