How to compose

Erin, in the middle of kindly linking here, says she can't imagine how you'd go about composing. Well, it's easy! Here's the Defeatist's Ten-Point Guide to Composing:

1. Take your instrument. If you don't have one, just sing or hum or something.

2. Play (or sing or hum) a tone. Carry on as long as you feel like it (or can without asphyxiating)

3. Now do another one.

4. And another.

5. Maybe you fancy playing a bunch of fast ones? Or not? Well, do or don't, whatever you feel like.

6. Maybe you fancy playing more than one at the same time? Well, why not? If you can only produce one tone at a time, consider having a friend handy.

7. Continue in this vein as long as you please.

8. Hey presto! You've just composed!

9. Write it down if you like. Or not. Doesn't really matter.

10. If you want to do something more complicated there'll probably be editing involved, but that's about it, really.

Survival strategies for the average composer (6)

6: Play music

This actually happened the other day. The words are a paraphrase, but the gist of the conversation is exact:

Girl 1: My partner is a composer, he writes music.

Girl 2: What does he play?

Girl 1: Oh, he doesn't play anything.

And there you have in a nutshell one of the biggest things that's gone wrong with so-called classical music in the past century or so.

We're very clever, us composers*, with our writing-things-down behaviour. You can do lots of impressive, complex things written down, sometimes so complicated that no-one can actually play them. There's a difference between pushing a player's technique and stamping all over it, and the only way you'll learn the difference is if you play music yourself.

As I typed that last sentence I horrified myself. Does it really need to be said that you should play? Well apparently it does. Theory's all well and good - hell, I'm full of theories - but practice is what really matters. Notations and systems and scores can blind you to the most important thing: Music isn't an object. It's an activity. There may be something more perverse you can do than write music while not performing it, but I can't think what it might be.

*"Composers" here refers specifically to people writing down stuff in the tradition of Western European "Art" music. I'm not sure other musical traditions make this sort of distinction.

Survival strategies for the average composer (5)

5: Stay away from composers

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the one thing a composer hates above all else, more than war, oppression, racism, Hitler, the Daily Mail, music critics, anything, is another composer.

That's not why I'm advising the average composer to stay away from other composers though, although that would go some way to avoiding a certain amount of bruising and bloodletting (if not seething, festering jealousy and resentment).

I don't mean you should never speak to another composer - you've got to learn something, for starters, and I'd not have got much out of the composers who taught me if I'd sat there mute, or refused to turn up to the tutorial. And I've enjoyed social congress with other note scribblers on many occasions, almost never ending in physical recriminations (it helps if you manage to get enough drink inside you to remove the ability to land a punch, of course).

No, what I'm thinking of is the sort of occasion you can see quite regularly in any place where scccm is being performed (perhaps, here in London - actually, almost certainly, here in London - a mini-festival organised by the London Sinfonietta or the SPNM). The performances come and go through the day, people drift in and out of the concert hall, gravitating towards the bar, usually, and little clusters of conversation can be seen. And here's the thing: it's nearly all composers talking to other composers. If you go along to one of these things, it's actually quite difficult to meet anyone who isn't a composer. Sometimes you might get the feeling that the entire concert scene in London is really just an excuse for a lot of composer networking opportunities.

Now, if making a career's your thing, blah blah, networking's one of those things you do, sure. But composers (mostly) aren't going to play your damn music. Unless you're writing stuff for yourself to perform (and that's a subject I'll return to), you need musicians. Friendly ones, who know you and will be willing to put up with your ill-thought-out notation and ignorance of what their instrument can do, and will gently, kindly tell you how to change it to make it better. Musicians are quite easy to meet - just go to the nearest pub after the gig. If you make friends with them, they'll be only to happy to offer advice, and it's not that big a step from there to persuading them to run through something you've written. So stop talking theory with all the composers and start talking practice with the players.

Survival strategies for the average composer (4)

4: Don't write for the Arditti Quartet

Let me make this clear right from the off: I've got no beef with the Arditti Quartet. They're an astonishing ensemble, who've brought some extraordinary music to life, and they and their contribution to so-called contemporary classical music (SCCCM) can't really be over-estimated. They reach heights of virtuosity that few if any other groups can, and when Stockhausen needed a quartet that could manage to keep time while flying about in four different helicopters, there was only one quartet to go to. I admire and respect Irvine Arditti and his cohorts immensely, and they are undoubtedly a Good Thing.

But even the Ardittis only work to a 24-hour day, some of which they have to sleep through, and there's a finite number of pieces they can look at.

When I go to composer workshops and the like, something that often strikes me is that many young composers seem to be unaware of this, and have written a piece that is, frankly, unplayable by anyone who isn't the Arditti Quartet. The Arditti's success seems to have encouraged a belief that nothing is unplayable, and that therefore everything should be made that much harder. It's like one of those Westerns when the local gunslinger has to put up with a succession of challenges of young bucks eager to prove they have a faster draw than him - the ultimate badge of composing respectability would be to write a piece that the Arditti Quartet couldn't play.

There are several reasons why this is a Bad Thing, not least because music is a social force for bringing people together in a spirit of exploration and cooperation, and to reduce it to a complexity pissing contest is a woeful waste of everybody's time. But here are the main points to bear in mind:

1. While the Ardittis do devote a saintly amount of their time to looking at scores of young composers, they're getting music written for them by all the most prominent composers around, so stop and think: are they really going to spend time scrabbling round your parts rather than Jonathan Harvey's?
2. Just because the Ardittis can play anything, it doesn't mean that anything is writable. Sometimes a piece is unplayable not because it's fearlessly testing the boundaries of instrumental technique, but because it's just badly written.
3. If you spend your time writing for a performance by the Arditti Quartet, you're missing out on the possibility of performances by other quartets, who may not have Irvine Arditti leading them but are nevertheless very good. Write for the musicians who are actually going to play your music. If you make friends with Irvine Arditti and he asks you to write him something really, really difficult, then you can pull out your bag of near-impossibilities.
4. With regard to the point above, if you hadn't considered the fact that at some point your best bet will be to ask someone other than Irvine Arditti to play your piece, you really need to rethink your priorities. Now.
   

Survival strategies for the average composer (3)

Great things are afoot at Defeatist Towers, but it's important not to let real life get in the way of procrastination, so here is the third in what remains for the moment a regular series.

3. It's not your fault... but you still have to deal with it.

Bobbins's comment on strategy no.2 raises some points that regularly come up if you're in the business of what we are pleased to call Contemporary Music, and just like a drunk in the pub, no matter how friendly the initial approach, when they appear you know in your heart that things are bound to turn nasty eventually.

But, like the lairy pisshead waiting outside the pub at 11 o'clock to deck you for looking at his pint or spilling his bird, there's no avoiding it, so we may as well pile in. There is, ahem, a debate continuing about what's happened in SCCM* since the turn of the last century, whether it's a valid development, whether it has any future or will ever attract a large audience, whether classical music is dead**, and whether the perpetrators should be dragged outside and given a damn good kicking by hoards of indignant Classic FM listeners.

Arnold Schoenberg, knocking up a few volleys in between alienating the masses

Now there are many arguments and counter-arguments here: Who abandoned whom first, composers or audiences (answer: audiences, as it happens, during the 19th century), whether it's allowable to write music not based on the tonal system (answer: of course it's "allowed", I'll write whatever the hell I like, thank you very much), and so on and so forth. As with the drunk man we met in the pub at the start of this post, an awful lot of this fractiousness is down to some misunderstandings, but that doesn't make the outcome any less violent. Except that it's down to a lot of misunderstandings that happened years ago, long before you and I were around.

The practical upshot of this is that as soon as you're outed as a composer, and just after the inevitable question is asked "Do you write modern music?", you'll be expected to be on the defensive about what your interrogator perceives as a century of atrocities that were perpetrated out of personal malice for them.*** The honest answer is that a) it was like that when you got here, b) yes, there is a lot of bad modern music about, but there's a lot of bad old music as well, it's just that we've had time to forget about that, c) not all modern music sounds the same, d) there's nothing inherently wrong, as it happens, in writing music with a limited audience, e) Hey, Schoenberg's really not that bad, have a listen to this great Hilary Hahn CD of the Violin Concerto! and f) actually this whole argument is at least 20 years out of date anyway, if you took the trouble to pay any attention to current trends. Unfortunately, such arguments will fall on deaf ears. Sorry, but as far as the world's concerned, everything's ruined, and it's all your fault, you composing bastard.


*SCCM: So-Called Classical Music.

**Classical music actually died in about 1827, of course.

*** I remember an occasion as a boy when a piece I wrote for a school music competition making limited use of serial techniques was denounced by my housemaster (yes, it was that kind of school) as "a sick joke". I argued back in a very cogent fashion, explaining the history of Schoenbergian technique and the long establishment and academic respectability of such methods, and was I think very restrained in that I never once used the phrase "you narrow-minded wanker". Or even anything worse.

Survival strategies for the average composer (2)

Judging by the swelling stats for yesterday, this is is obviously a topic that has gripped the imagination of literally some people. So let's not hang about! Strategy number two awaits.

2. Accept your insignificance

Yesterday I discussed the unavoidable fact that the normal thing for a composer to do is stop composing, which means that if you're still doing it past college, you must be some kind of weirdo. But what drives those of us who do to do the thing we do?

There's a fallacy that's common in SCCM: that because, say, Beethoven's late quartets weren't immediately understood or accepted by his contemporaries, and as they're clearly a work of genius, then anything that's not immediately understood or accepted by one's contemporaries must therefore be a clear work of genius. It hardly seems worth pointing out that this is false logic, but so many composers still seem to fall into the trap that I suppose I must.

This isn't something that's limited to the Average Composer, by the way: it's a nonsense that infects the entire business from top to bottom. Closely related is the delusion that because you're writing SCCM, what you produce is therefore more significant than whatever happens to be in the charts or on the front of the music press. As the logical conclusion to this line of thought is to declare that Paul McCartney's Liverpool Oratorio is a more significant piece of music than Penny Lane, I fell no need to dissect this one further for now.

The reason I mentioned Beethoven was that this stuff is largely his fault: before him composers were admired and revered, but it was after Beethoven that the composer as Artist took a hold, and it was only a step from there to the morass of self-importance that the Classical Music business finds itself mired in now. Even now, some 200 years later, composers are expected, indeed encouraged, to measure themselves against a deaf German from the early 19th century.

Now, I'm not saying that you're not as culturally significant as Beethoven; but let's face it, as composers have been trying, and mostly failing, to live up to his example ever since, it's pretty unlikely. Most of the top composers now, whatever they may like to think, are nowhere near that level, and probably neither are you. And the fact that nobody's ever heard of you (and come to think of it, pretty much nobody outside the tiny, tiny clique surrounding them has heard of the top composers either), does not mean that you're a misunderstood genius. It just means no-one's ever heard of you. Accept this, stop worrying about your place in posterity, and you'll be a big step on the way to happiness.

Survival strategies for the average composer (1)

Average, a.

1. Estimated by average; i.e. by equally distributing the aggregate
inequalities of a series among all the individuals of which the series is
composed.

2. Equal to what would be the result of taking an average; medium, ordinary; of the usual or prevalent standard.

Most composers, if we are honest (and few of us are) are average. This isn't necessarily a qualitative judgement - although that comes into it. What I mean is that most of us are neither in the shining stratosphere of success, from which a few names look down beatifically while the rest of us stare sullenly back with a barely concealed jealous rage, nor in that sad category of people who persist in pursuing the muse despite ample evidence that they have no talent whatsoever for it, on whom the rest of us look down with a mixture of disdain, smugness and relief. Most of us bumble along, turning out pieces as and when we can squeeze them between the demands of a day job and the need to get the groceries in, occasionally getting a performance and filling with optimism that this time, our big break is coming, before sinking back into our routines as the recognition fails to erupt, and we carry on with the next piece, slightly crestfallen, but soon once more hopeful that what we write holds some significance beyond ourselves, and will be recognised eventually, and preferably before we fulfil the essential condition of being a composer and die.

Of course, as Morton Feldman pointed out, being a composer is inherently abnormal, as the normal thing for a composer to do is give up, probably soon after he or she leaves university or college and realises the full extent of the world's indifference to SCCM*. But given that you've failed to fall at that hurdle, and are bobbing by, neither sinking nor swimming, what you need to do is take on board certain facts. Hence this, the first in a series of posts designed to enlighten and educate, and make the average composer's life if not better then at least slightly more tolerable. And following from the sage words of Mr Feldman, let's proceed:

1: Admit it, you're weird

You are though, aren't you? If you had any sense you'd have quit this composing lark years ago. Unfortunately, you somehow managed to leave the education system without having the idea that anyone might be interested in anything you have to say knocked out of you, and if you're still scribbling now, it's probably too late for you. Admitting to yourself that what you do is weird is the first, and possibly most important step to take if you're going to cope with being a composer in the 21st century. You can expect the world to tolerate what you do, but by and large, you can't expect it to show any interest in it. Occasionally someone will appear to express something greater than apathy, but it'll very rarely lead anywhere, so don't get your hopes up.

*SCCM: So-called classical music