What do you feel when composing?

Hey guys! I am going to ask all of you what do you feel when composing. i feel like this is a real interesting question since I usually feel nothing emotional during composing. During composing my mind is only music-wise, thinking what to do in this passage and what details should be added, or how to make the passages smooth, but never feel that passages just composed by me myself. Usually it’s after I finish the composition or at least some passages that I start to realise what emotion are the passages expressing, or what messages are they conveying, even I am the composer.

I know that many composers feel what they are composing. For example they feel sad when they composing and their product will be tragic and sad. I just usually use my mind to compose without feeling it. One example is that I was composing the last passages of the fugal 3rd Movement of my Clarinet Quintet. The passage to me is quite heavily tragic, but I only realise it much later after finishing the movement. During composing that passage I was happily watching Olympics at my home. I was only thinking of the counterpoint then. It seems quite weird for me to feel happy at the time of composing tragic music. Or maybe I am quite an emotional person so I have already stored up emotions from my daily life, and I can just release them during composing without my knowing of it.
 

Sometimes when I am the pianist playing my own works, I feel like I don’t know what the composer is saying, even though the composer is myself, or I don’t feel like the piece is composed by myself but another person. I as a pianist have to grab the details to know the intention of myself as a composer, like an I-object grasping I-subject, and I really feel like this is very interesting.

So what do you guys feel during composing? Only musical details and calculation, or the pulse, or the harmony, melody , or the emotion? Feel free to express yourself here and I am very curious!

Have a great weekend!

Henry

I also don't feel anything while composing.  I am too focused on imagining the melodies and harmonies and making sure that the composition will be coherent and with variety and unity etc.  Only once I enter my composition into the computer do I start to identify emotions with the sound of the composition.  But sometimes (as with my most recent piece - Harvest Moon Piano Quintet - "Mountains") I enter my compositions piecemeal into Musescore and I hear parts of my composition before I compose other parts.  I think this is sometimes necessary as some compositions' conclusion isn't certain and my motivation to finish them on paper without hearing them is doubtful.  But there is also the risk that I start to identify so much emotion with the unfinished composition that it becomes more and more impossible to finish it as the expectation and pressure to deliver the finished product becomes too great.  I'd much rather finish the whole composition dispassionately without feeling anything because this allows me to keep a more objective relationship to the musical materials and not feel too attached to it.  Those are my thoughts.  Thanks for coming up with this great topic!

Peter

It's usually the other way around for me. Instead of "feeling" what I compose, I compose the feeling I want to convey. But the feeling comes more from music appreciation. Depending on the composer, I can usually feel what the composer's message is. I think a good example of this is Tchaikovsky's last movement of his last symphony. Or lets go ancient! Baroque has emotion too, such as Bach's Toccata in D minor. Here, we have music from the 1700's and Bach was able to create a story out of this piece. Absolutely wonderful because I feel this specific piece is very freestyle, and almost a little like Chopin's Ballades (in terms of storytelling). And speaking of Chopin, he was also very good at creating emotion using the piano, as any one of his Ballades is literally equivalent to a short story in literature.

Going contemporary, Schindler's List comes to mind as very, very emotional and something I think most people can feel. It conveys a slightly different message than Tchaikovsky's symphony 6 (*without knowing anything about this movie...it sounds more like a love story gone bad, or someone who is dealing with a great loss). This piece is musically less sophisticated than Tchaikovsky's 6th, but more modern and may appeal to a broader audience. And in terms of Tchaikovsky's 6th, he's conveying death and darkness of some type in a very eloquent manner. Both works however do the job of getting the listener to feel sadness though, and I think even an inexperienced listener can understand that the last movement of Tchaikovsky's 6th is absolutely devastating.

* Peter told me what this movie was about. After research, it appears to be about a man named Oskar Schindler, who became a humanitarian and gave up his savings to help those in need during WWII. I had no idea. No wonder this music is so emotional.

Interestingly, I usually don't feel anything while composing, but when I've just finished composing something that evokes a very negative emotion, I usually feel horrible after I'm done, it's kind of like I just finished unpacking a bunch of bad feelings. However, I am a very passionate and emotional performer, so I love watching or hearing my music get played.

The MIDI controller and coffee cup

I completely agree with @chopin, I compose what I feel or I make myself feel the emotion the piece is trying to portray. But I don’t usually feel anything while composing, just when I listen to what I have just composed, when I improvise or when I try to plan or imagine in my head the dramatic climax of the piece

What do I feel while composing?  Usually frustration, occasionally satisfaction, rarely excitement.  That's pretty much it.  I don't feel whatever emotion is inherent in the music.

1 hour ago, Aiwendil said:

What do I feel while composing?  Usually frustration.

Yeah, I forgot to say the most common one, Haha

Very interesting this topic.
For a long time, my compositional processes were simply learning, and I consider them just exercises. Of course, from time to time there was an idea that I found valuable.
Already at another stage, with more resources, to my credit... I still continue to do many things as examples and exercises, because my amateur pedagogical vocation is very strong.
But when I start writing music by itself, both things happen to me. Sometimes I am absorbed in the music itself, in how to develop ideas, textures, combinations, harmonies and etc... But other times I am moved by emotions that I want, in some way, to express. The truth is that it has, in my opinion, quite a bit of technique. The more you know, the more repertoire of compositional resources you have, the better you can express an emotion.

 Good question.

   I tend to "think" my way through composing, as far as my emotional interaction with the piece's content.

   I think of that saying  Inspiration is for Amateurs!"--  If the great composers all FELT in response to what they were writing, they likely would have been trainwrecks in a few short years.  Mozart and Bach were music production MACHINES--and produced profoundly moving pieces of greatly different character, one right behind the other-- thing Mozart's symphony 40 and 41, composed within weeks of one another... Or the requiem composed alongside the Die Zauberflote.

     After all, composing is difficult---questions of form, phrasing, harmonics... constant judgment and weighing of factors--who has TIME to FEEL!!???

  That said, while I'm composing, I feel different things in different phases. 

   Starting, I feel trepidation and doubt--ANXIETY!-- while I work on thematic material, base ideas.  However, once that is finished, and I am (hopefully) truly happy with the material, I am very content and cheerful working up a proper piece of music. PROFOUNDLY HAPPY.

  When finished, I've I've noticed a depression for a day or two.

   I was interested to read that Brahms and other composers have a tendency to do this too.  Makes sense--after all the intense labor and focus, and JOY of MAKING, our babies are born and we have a sort of "post-partum" moment.  What should we do with ourselves??

  But then the creative urge returns, and it is on to something new....

On 10/19/2023 at 7:20 AM, Rich said:

Starting, I feel trepidation and doubt--ANXIETY!-- while I work on thematic material, base ideas.  However, once that is finished, and I am (hopefully) truly happy with the material, I am very content and cheerful working up a proper piece of music. PROFOUNDLY HAPPY.

  When finished, I've I've noticed a depression for a day or two.

   I was interested to read that Brahms and other composers have a tendency to do this too.  Makes sense--after all the intense labor and focus, and JOY of MAKING, our babies are born and we have a sort of "post-partum" moment.  What should we do with ourselves??

 

WOW! I share the same process with you probably, ESPECIALLY with the post-partum syndrome after finishing a piece. I remember after finishing my Clarinet Quintet in C minor, it took me months to get off from it before starting the Sextet. Also I always feel like my pieces are trash when I have just finished a piece, just like a mother with post-partum syndrome who hates her own baby.

!!

i think generally the emotion, mood or vibe is something i feel before writing, as well as during.  After it’s done, i think i’ve overdosed on that particular feeling for a while so i tend to be largely desensitized to whatever i was trying to convey until time elapses.

I’m not sure if i enjoy the creative process per se, but i feel as if it would be a kind of tragedy if i didn’t complete the work, so the sense of purpose or mission is definitely there to get me through it (so far in my composing “career”, emphasis on the quotations.)

The thing that I love about it is that, after it’s done, i know that i’ve expressed myself, that being, in all things music and non-music, my reason for living.