Did you take this course with the expectation that it would afford you the opportunity to freely express yourself through music? Composition may be like no other music course in terms of this expectation, at least amongst some students.
We do not expect this freedom in performance-related courses, even if we can agree that performing the works of others can (and, IMO, must!) involve an element of personal expression, and we certainly don't have it in courses like 1st- and 2nd- year music theory, or renaissance and baroque counterpoint, where we learn (amongst other things) to compose "in the style of" other composers and periods.
The only other course I can think of where there might be a similar expectation of the freedom to express oneself is Improvisation, but even in that course there are conventions to be learned. Group improvisation involves listening to others and working collectively with what you hear more than it does unrestricted personal expression.
As I think you have all discovered, even composition courses involve some restrictions on expressive freedoms. Each of the project guidelines/descriptions in this course, for instance, set out goals and limits within which each student had to work.
There is still tremendous freedom within these limits, but they are there all the same. You couldn't write tonal music for the first project, for example (at least not if you wanted to do well in the course!). And yet, as I think we all heard during our class recital last Thursday, everybody managed to write very personal and individual music within the limits, which was great, and exactly how it should be!
The idea of compositional restrictions can come as something of a disappointment for some students, unfortunately, and perhaps understandably so, since composition, like writing stories, novels, or plays, or creating any art, tends to be regarded as an activity based on complete freedom of expression. What business do composition professors have restricting students' creative impulses? Who do they think they are, anyway???!
Well, here's the way I think of it:
If you were to write a short story and submit it to a magazine for publication, there would be an excellent chance that your story would be rejected. Famous writers sometimes keep boxes filled with rejection slips — it seems to go with the territory — as a reminder of how long they had to persevere before becoming successful.
But let's say you took your story to an experienced editor who told you in very specific terms what was wrong with it. Perhaps it was in need of plot development, or it had technical issues such as faulty grammar, overuse of the same words, misuse of other words, overuse of 'etc.,' etc. :p
What would you do?
- Decide the editor is an idiot who doesn't know what s/he is talking about, and just keep sending the same story, unchanged, to as many journals as you can think of, in hopes that someone will one day see what a great story it is (after all, someone's got to win the lottery, right?).
- Take the editor's advice to heart, and work at fixing the story.
- All of the above (i.e., decide the editor's an idiot but take the advice to heart anyway!).
- Berate yourself for allowing yourself to think that you could ever be a writer (believe me, most successful composers and writers have had thoughts along these lines at some point(s) in their lives!).
Composing music is not a perfect analogy to story-writing, of course, but there are many parallels between them. Both, at their best, represent a mixture of conventions, creativity, and technique.
My goal as a composition teacher is to (a) encourage creativity, but, more importantly, (b) help you develop the technique to express that creativity.
And that is why every project has some restrictions!
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11 comments:
After I was done being confused over why we couldn't freely write what we wanted in composition class I started thinking about what we would learn if we just wrote what we wanted. The idea of having restrictions put upon compositions may seem frustrating but at the same it forces us to learn how to work with specific elements of music; so that when we do get the opportunity to write freely we have a much larger database from which we can draw ideas. Atonality for example is something that I know I avoided like the black plague, but after writing three pieces "because I had to" (in composition class) I find I'm a lot more comfortable with it and now if I ever decide to include it in my future works I feel like I can do so much more effectively.
I think that's the real point of composition class.
I totally agree with this blog. I mean, there are plenty of reasons on why to set restrictions for what we compose:
A) It keeps us on track and gives people who have never composed before something to be guided by.
B) It makes the compositions less arbitrary to be marked. For example, how do you distinguish between pieces and their marks if there were no guidelines? That would be rather tricky.
And many more...
Composition class to me is an opportunity to write beyond my comfort level (sometimes) in a limited timeline which basically simulates real life situations. I like hearing other student's compositions the most because I like to think of what can be changed or written better and i like to hear comments of others to see what I am missing in hearing their pieces.
Expressing yourself through composition puts you in an exciting yet vulnerable situation surrounded by "critics". It is so challenging to put your creations out in the open and hope not to crash and burn.
I was one of those people who were saddened by the fact that we couldn't write what we wanted. (This was at the beginning of the term.) Now, I understand much better why it was necessary to be this way. To me you're being even more creative if you have to work with these rules and guidelines because you need to abide by the rules and be creative at the same time.
At the same time, I don't think there needs to be an atonal section in everyones piece just to be creative and different. I think someone who has a completely tonal piece can set up unexpected passages just as well. It seems like a lot of people are going for an atonal section as their unexpected part within their piece. (I'm doing that!) I think it would be cool if there were some pieces that didn't do that.
I'm not knocking atonality. I like it. I'm just having a bit of a rant here! :)
EDIT: I posted a reply here on November 15, but I just now noticed that it was in need of an edit in the last paragraph, without which the paragraph did not make much sense! So, here it is again, slightly edited:
In response to Melissa B's comment ("At the same time, I don't think there needs to be an atonal section in everyones piece just to be creative and different. I think someone who has a completely tonal piece can set up unexpected passages just as well"), I agree completely!
I hope I haven’t been conveying a sense to the class that all pieces in the current project must veer into atonality, because I certainly don’t feel that way.
However, when I wrote the above blog I was becoming concerned that, in the early stages of this project, some of the pieces I was hearing did not seem to be venturing very far beyond the cliché or idiom upon which they were based — If I were to listen to those pieces without knowing that they were intended as a recontextualization exercise, I wasn’t sure I would have been able to figure it out.
While it is clearly possible to write good music within a particular style or cliché, that was not the point of this project, so the possibility that some compositions might not have been heading in this direction concerned me. One of the primary objectives in any of the composition assignments I give is to get students thinking about music in a way they might otherwise not do, AKA “thinking outside the box.” If a composition is not clearly distinguishable from the style or idiom upon which it is based, it probably means the student composer was not thinking sufficiently “outside the box” when writing it.
Which, to bring this back to Melissa’s comment, is why I so often encourage/coerce students to consider introducing atonality into their compositions. It is a way of recontextualizing a cliché or idiom.
There are other ways, of course! But, quite frankly, I think that introducing atonality (or at least something other than diatonic or chromatic harmony) into the composition makes the task of recontextualization a lot easier in most cases than not doing so.
I'm not sure I think of these guidelines as "restrictions", but maybe more as just that, guidelines. It's like creating anything, unless you have a clear direction for what you're creating, it becomes very easy to fall off track. A professor who tells their students to write a paper on ANYTHING would be faced with some seriously confused and frustrated students. When I'm given guidelines like those given in the first project, I find it much easier to focus on specific creative goals like character or mood.
I think the restrictions/guidelines for this course were great! It challenged many people to step outside of their comfort zones and try things (such as atonality) that many would normaly avoid. Just look at all of the great music that has been created! We can can compose what we want, with no restrictions all of the time outside of this class, so this opportunity allowed us to learn and grow as musicians and composers.
I know that i've learned a lot so far and I appreciate the "push" that this course provided myself and others into the realm of composition.
Dr. Ross, I think you (along with everyone else's comments) hit the nail right on the head.
It was hard to accept at first the we were going to have boundaries. I guess we were all too naive to think that we could actually do whatever we wanted and still learn something.
I took the Jazz Improvisation course last year, and there are more rules in that course that some other of the textbook guided courses. There are more rules that one can imagine, it almost seems overwhelming.
After hearing everyone's piece this past weekend, and hearing how different they were from one another, its hard to imagine what the class could come up with if there had been no restrictions at all.
Also, I think the process of composing would be even more tedious if we were beginning with no boundaries.
That was a whole lot of ideas in one chunk... sorry if it's incoherent. ha. But yeah, the guidelines really made it easier I think to begin with composing.
-Melissa
Let the tumult of comments from delinquint bloggers begin!
i think even within the guidelines of the projects in this course, creativity is a powerful force that needs harnessing. For me, complete freedom in a project would be dangerous since i already have a hard enough time commiting myself to developing ideas and creating coherence in music. Not to say that if we had complete freedom we wouldn't be able to compose coherently, but i think it was enough trying to achieve that within the boundaries. I think most composers have some sort of sense of purpose or function of a piece before they begin...i think. but of course i'm not a composer so I really have no idea.
I appreciate the value of constraints, especially in a learning exercise. People often learn the most when working in unfamiliar territory, and without constraints forcing them into it, might be just as inclined to follow familiar grooves.
Of course, it can be rather less pleasant if the constraints require you to write in a style or context that you actively dislike. I'm not sure how much I'd appreciate a project that required writing rap, for example. I'm sure whatever came out of it would be as far removed as I could possibly get away with...
The atonality project was a good example of beneficial constraints, though. I had my share of misgivings at the beginning (like many people), and it's not something I would have tried unless I had to, but I definitely feel I benefited from the exercise once I'd managed to find some bearings in unfamiliar territory.
Of course, people often bring their own constraints to creative projects, even if no external ones are provided. If this project had been "Compose whatever you feel like", people would probably still have settled on ideas or styles that have some definition, and then worked within those.
I found the comment Dr. Ross made about the Jazz Improvisation course interesting, and I hope to strengthen his blog's argument with this comment. Like Melissa, I took the Jazz Styles and Improv course last year or so. I found that there wasn't much room for personal expression in that course! The course focused more on different styles of jazz, or what notes or scales you could play over certain chords than emoting through your solo. I find that learning to perform a skill and expressing your deepest feeling through it are two completely different things. After all, as a children we usually learn to speak using one word at a time, not by writing poems to express ourselves.
A neat thing about the organ repertoire that doesn't seem to have trickled down into the other areas of western music is the importance put on improvisation. The neat fact about this is the fact that most famous organ composers were improvisers, and they would make up music that expressed themselves or a text or whatever. They would then write down this improvisation and sell it as music. Much of the organ rep is like this, from the Baroque to Modern. Louis Vierne, for example, was a blind organist, who would play into a gramophone. Then scholars would take the records and transcribe them. So from this example I think we can take the importance of improvisation and not look down upon it. Often people look down on jazz musicians for they 'make everything up' but maybe more people would respect them if they knew the role of improvisation in the organ world :)
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