Demystifying the Composer

Our culture has a long tradition of having a deep love/hate relationship with artists of all types. It often seems that the composer, be him idolized or scorned, is very rarely taken seriously as a normal human. Moreover, people will sometimes create a compositional mystique by encouraging stereotypes, being Romantic or evasive about the creative process, etc. Unfortunately, none of these behaviors do any of us any favors. I think it’s incredibly important for all of us to remember, if we don’t already, that the composer is—gasp—a working human who has flaws.

I'm going to share two anecdotes of ways in which composers and/or authority figures unnecessarily create some sort of composer “mystique.” I will then explain why I think these anecdotes offer examples of why such a mystique is fundamentally detrimental to the compositional process.

Anecdote #1: Several years ago I knew a certain authority figure (who shall remain nameless and genderless) who made a statement to a group of composers that they (and I’m paraphrasing) “would have no respect for a composer who would move a passage up the octave at an orchestra reading, upon realizing that it didn’t ‘sound good’ in the range that it was originally written.” I can understand being critical of a composer who didn’t write something within the ranges of the instruments, but that didn’t seem to be the issue here. This authority figure went on to suggest that composers should hear the music in the timbre of that specific instrument in that specific octave from the get-go. To this person, such an experiment of moving something around was only a display of some sort of artistic or “inner-ear” weakness.

First of all this is just rubbish coming from an authority figure. This person’s statement falls way too easily into the Romanticized notion of the composer as some sort of godlike being who should have an innate sense of music dating back to his/her time in the womb. Furthermore, it is a detrimental thing to say to young composers who want to learn and want to experiment. Composers make mistakes and composers have to learn. As my teacher once pointed out to me, moving a passage up an octave or even five octaves can sometimes be incredibly revelatory. How else are we supposed to develop an “inner ear” if we’re not even allowed to experiment without feeling that we will lose somebody’s respect? What a paralyzing statement!

Anecdote #2: This is more a situational thing, rather than a specific anecdote, but often you will hear composers (authority figures and peers) speak disparagingly about MIDI software and notation programs. I'm not referring to complaints about the piano patch sounding hollow or the saxophone sounding like a dying duck (I've made those statements myself and I greatly appreciate and understand these kind of complaints). What I'm referring to here is when people suggest that using MIDI is, again, some kind of artistic weakness. People will sometimes go so far as to suggest that if you use the software to compose that you are inherently a bad composer.

But as a composer aptly pointed out to me recently, “bad composers will use notation software as a crutch, good composers will use it as a tool.” Many composers for centuries have been using the piano to find their chords and to work out their compositions. Is that somehow better because it is an acoustic instrument and not a machine? I also once heard a professional composer admit that he’d written at least a couple pieces that he could not have conceived of without the playback from a notation program. How refreshing! At the end of the day, if it’s good music that people can learn from and enjoy, who cares what tools you used to make it? Are you really going to scorn a writer who uses a laptop instead of ink and a quill? Assuming that composers don’t experiment or don’t need tools to make their work just sets up a mystique that can potentially paralyze young composers.

Feel free to comment with your own stories regarding the unhelpful composer mystique below. This post falls under a new label of "composers anonymous," as I have found that it's necessary to write some of these stories out as my own form of therapy. It's nice to get rid of all of the unhelpful compositional and artistic baggage that we accumulate over the years!

Posted by Natalie