Orchestra Readings as Antithetical to Risk-Taking

Too often we tend to play it safe when we compose. Sometimes we do this accidentally--we may have discovered several techniques or strategies that we know will "work" and we rely on these while expanding our ideas somewhat conservatively. Alexandra Gardner recently wrote an excellent article for NewMusicBox in which she called on all of us to be willing to take greater risks and to accept greater challenges, with the idea that our compositional skills will grow in leaps and bounds if we do so.

I absolutely agree with the importance of risk-taking--it is, I think, one of the most necessary aspects of compositional education and growth. Sometimes I worry, however, that our institutions, ensembles, and pedagogical tactics operate in ways that are actually antithetical to risk-taking.

Conquering Writer's Block

Whenever I start a new phase of my life I often have some trouble relaxing, which invariably leads to an irksome (yes, I just used “irksome” in this blog post) spat of writer’s block. Good news…I’ve conquered it at the moment! But it got me thinking about writing and all the little tricks we can develop to get ourselves out of these ruts.

If I wasn’t a composer or such a weirdo nerd, I probably would think these were entirely ridiculous, but I kind of love Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies and I highly recommend them to anybody who is looking for some new angles for thinking about their musical sketching. I had an interesting discussion with my teacher recently about how the pressure of creating the “piece” itself can be completely stifling sometimes. He talked about how we can try to trick ourselves into not composing a piece and just working on sketches, exercises, compositional “games,” or any other kind of project that will allow us to separate our creative juices from the worry of performance, overall aesthetic, and all kinds of other potentially unhelpful external concerns and static.