May 4, 2018
As I approach my roughly 10-year anniversary as a composer, I thought I’d post a few things that might help other budding composers as they search for their voice, process, and inspiration. My own journey of compositional self discovery is, first and foremost, still happening, but a few crucial throughlines have made getting to this point possible. The most important of these is the ability to connect everything to, well, everything.
It started out as a game. When I was in the car as a kid, after reading billboards and digesting their meaning, I would disassemble the words into amounts of letters and try to find equal proportions between them (e.g. “Get a chocolate shake” has nine letters in chocolate and nine letters in the other three words). Later, I started to consider how a billboard’s message related to the previous one, even if they didn’t immediately have anything in common (e.g. an ad about an auto shop followed by an ad about a downtown club made me think about how often the cars they worked on had owners who frequented that club). While sometimes this way of thinking didn’t help–I’m the only one who thinks my jokes are funny or that I’m a savant when it comes to seeing facial similarities, but that’s a post for a different day–it sure does allow for exciting possibilities when learning about music.
Voice leading and harmonic motion have very particular historical tendencies and have evolved slowly and steadily over time. But experimentations in any particular time period– Gesualdo and Vincentino in the late Renaissance, Scriabin and Janáček in the late-19th Century, and Thomas Adès and Libby Larsen today are all good examples of this–offer brilliant, unique possibilities with seemingly disparate sounds. Luckily, we don’t have to look at extremes to understand this concept.
In order to experiment, there are a few key things to keep in mind:
This Synectic Artistry series of posts will focus on a variety of ways we can conceptualize the pieces we write. How do you find unique avenues of inspiration?