A letter to young composers

As you engage yourselves in the laborious process of learning the mechanics and structure of music, it is important that you ask yourself the following questions:  For whom are you composing?  To what end?

It's easy to get caught up in whatever the current style of music is being prompted by your teachers and your classmates.  It's easy to begin writing music that will impress your peers and be approved by your teachers.  A certain competitive element can creep in to your composition, emphasizing your desire to be known as "an original" composer.  Your audience becomes very local, and as is the case with all music written for a local and limited audience, parochial. Music in such a setting becomes more of an intellectual exercise than a creative one.  Music can become based on non-musical ideas, and as such is more self-congratulatory than satisfying. It may have been an exercise in originality but that is not enough to make it worthwhile or memorable  music.

The second question follows from your honest answer to the first:  What do you want to express in your composition?  Clearly any event and any emotion can form the basis for a piece of music. Richard Strauss is quoted as stating he could set a laundry list to muic.  But he didn't. Are all emotions worthy of expression?  Why do you think people listen to "serious" music?  Do they want to hear the chaos and wickedness and violence of our world brought into the concert hall or the living room?

Or is music ideally a reminder of a more beautiful and perfect world?  Some of the best music, modern as well as 100 years old, is based on the following elements:  melody, harmony, couterpoint, rhythm and to some degree repetition.  We like to hold it in our heads and hearts as we travel through an imperfect and frightening world.  It gives us a sense of order and beauty, words which many young composers don't seem to understand.  To be beautiful, music does not have to be happy.  It can express sorrow, grief, rage and a host of less pleasant emotions.  But for those emotions to move us as an audience, they must have the basic elements.  There must be a structure we can feel, not just understand intellectually.

Probably in modern times film and television musical scores are closer to the musical ideal.  While they can be chaotic and without apparent structure, the visual images accompanying them provide a background against which they can be at least understood.  Some of this music stays with us, and deservedly so.  Some that is more purely expressive of the visual  events (the "laundry list") disappears forever when the images are turned off.  They served a purpose, of course, but not a musical one.

If I can't hear it in my head and heart it disappears into the chaos of everyday existence.  It might as well never have been.