Naming Your Pieces

Ha, as if professionalism has everything and anything to do with naming music. Naming music has everthing and anything to do with the core idea about the composition. :P

Awesome topic.  

This approaches some cool philosophical questions, but questions that every composer really has to address for themselves.  

I don't give any titles to my work aside from noting it's key, instrumentation, and form. 

The naming of a piece is of the utmost importance and is entirely a matter of personal philosophy.  Names are supremely important to human beings, always have been and will be for some time.  We name everything; feelings, concepts, objects, actions, planets, bodies of water, our kids, our pets, our cars (maybe that's just me) - everything.  As a result of evolutionary process, we are highly categorical thinkers, our brains are always sorting and grouping like things together (seeing a tiger for the first time and knowing it's dangerous because it's a large predatory cat is an advantage).  Assigning things names is key to that process and helps us to remember and communicate those categorizations (being able to tell someone else that it's dangerous for the same reason, also an advantage).  And since that's essentially the basis for everything mankind has accomplished for tens of thousands of years, names are to be considered that much more important. 

In regard to your question about form, these formal names often do imply it, but that does not mean they are entirely obedient to it.  This obsessive compulsive pedagogical behavior is what kills me about intellectualizing classical music.  You're a composer, you're in charge, you don't have to ask for anyone's permission.  The fact is forms change over time, and the only way they do that is through applied variation. Go ahead and call your piece a string quartet.  Just because someone doesn't agree doesn't mean it isn't.  Hell, just because that's what it's called doesn't mean that's definitely what it is.  People lie, deceive and misrepresent themselves, why can't music?

The naming of music in many classical traditions is highly representative of our categorical thought processes.  Pieces are often named for their key, orchestration, and form - if not by the composer, then by the analyst and theorist.  If you're dealing with the work of a composer on any large scale, particularly one who has written hundreds of pieces, it certainly aids the memory and facilitates communication and understanding to be able to categorize them and name them accordingly.  Regardless of what you name your piece, it's likely to be referred to by some cold technical title by someone at some point for sheer convenience.    

Then there's the romantic naming paradigm.  A lot of celebrated romantic composers were highly influenced by art, particularly literature, and in a variety of ways - like reworking Greek and Shakespearean tragedies and composing music to contemporary poetry.  To many of them, music was enhanced by language, and language by music and they actively sought to associate the two.  Naturally they should fancy applying such enhancing language to the titles of their pieces.  There are also a group of romantic composers who defy this categorization.  Neither Chopin, the master of romantic pianoforte nor Beethoven, the father of romanticism, named their pieces.  Some composers rejected the association with language and the highly representative nature of romanticism entirely.  Some even rejected that music meant anything at all.  Naturally, they wouldn't have spent too much time worrying about catchy titles.

It boils down to a matter of personal philosophy. 

It certainly influences the way it is perceived, I don't think it matters as much in the way you mean though.  The audience for classical music is relatively narrow, and it's typically an acquired taste that goes along with some background, so it's probably not going to play a huge factor in whether or not they choose to buy or listen to your piece.  They're pretty familiar with seeing the formal names of pieces, in fact they might be more thrown off by some strange title.  If you give the audience any kind of title, they have a way to categorize it with all of the other music they've heard.  If you give them a novel title, they have something memorable to hang on to throughout the piece and thereafter, which may be an excellent means to your end.  But that title creates an expectation.   If your piece is called 'Autumn Wind', I'm probably going to be reminded of cold weather and falling leaves and expect something lonely and vulnerable, not circus music.  How you choose to negotiate that is entirely up to you, but it certainly affects the audiences' experience.  If I'm expecting 'Autumn Wind' and I do hear circus music or shred guitar, I'm going to be caught off guard, now vigilantly on my guard, distracted and confused by what I'm hearing, and ultimately less likely to engage in a genuinely open musical experience with you.  That's all assuming your goal is to connect with the listener, but you may want to just jar the hell out of them, I don't know.  Danger music can be fun too.  I digress...

It's a matter of whether you think language ultimately enhances or distracts from the music.  It's certainly capable of doing both.  Someone yelling might be perceived as distracting from my piano playing whereas someone singing perceived as enhancing it.  

Personally, I don't bother to name my pieces for anything other than their key, form, and instrumentation.  I take that back, I deliberately name them that way, and I don't think it's out of neglect.  I don't like the idea of a bunch of neurons firing in the language centers of people's brains and all of this symbolism overwhelming their attention while a piece of mine is playing.  To me it's about conveying things and things in ways that language can't.  Plus, what with the the age of convenience and social media, people have a hard enough time concentrating as it is...

As Mr. Elliot Carter said, Beethoven didn't name those pieces as such.  I would argue a counter-thesis that masterpieces are given the privilege of titles, but that would require defining a masterpiece, which would require a comprehensive foundation of the aesthetics of music, which no one can seem to produce (we can recognize a bad melody, but we can't say why a good melody is different from a great melody).

I think your questions regard a much bigger philosophical question that we all have to answer for ourselves.  As composers, should we be more concerned with tradition and convention or invention and innovation?  

And if you really want to twist your brain around it, hasn't the tradition been innovation?  At least the part of the tradition we like to remember has been.  So then what the hell do you do...?

My pieces are often tied to my emotions, so once I'm done composing I tend to think of a name that is relative, takes me a few seconds considering I know what I was feeling while composing the piece. It may be different for others but this is my process.

Neither Chopin, the master of romantic pianoforte nor Beethoven, the father of romanticism, named their pieces.

Er, what?  Beethoven certainly gave his Sixth Symphony the subtitle 'Pastoral' and even provided descriptive introductions to each movement. Then there are works such as the incidental music to plays about Egmont and Coriolanus, and Fidelio which have a very definite extra-musical programme. What about The Consecration of the House, which is clearly intended to portray such a religious ceremony?  What about all his leider?  Christus am Olberge?

But even before romantic composers we had composers naming compositions:

Here are few examples to fit your fancy:

Handel's "Water Music suite"

Vivilda's "The Four Seasons"

Both of these are Baroque composers.

Thats a good question, and I personally name my pieces generically, with opus numbers so I can track how (or, "whether") I've developed.