In my experience as a conductor of new music, composers cannot always describe accurately how they compose. Others are indeed very invested in their methodical compositional techniques, and still, they cannot guarantee that “music” will arise. (What is music, will you ask?) Still others will hide some of the fruitful sources of their inspiration or technique, and instead will present themselves in a manner that will match the professional parlance of the time. I have long suspected Stravinsky is one such case, but it will take me some research to prove it. All in all, a fascinating process, composition is…

Carmen-Helena Tellez
carmentellez.com

I agree, I find it such an intense and subjective experience, that my memory of the reasons and logic is often hazed, my act of explaining the process requires, many times, a theoretical construct that rewrites the history so that I can both understand and explain to others.

Often when reading interviews, it seems that the composer excepts the interviewer’s description and then formulates a story to match. Particularly in film music and other industrial usages, “I was just filling the two seconds and seven frames before the train goes around the bend” seems too practical, so “yes, I WAS reflecting the inner life of the train wheel through the repetition (slightly sped up) of the motif.” …. “Would I call it the train wheel motif? … absolutely (heh-heh) yeah, that is just what I called it, yeah, THE TRAIN WHEEL MOTIF”. That will then be passed down through book and lore as what the maestro was doing, everyone goes home happy.

Well, thats great. Wonderful. However, some of us composers have indeed spent a great deal of time developing our skills and in R + D and are very very sure and very exact about where it comes from and where it wants to go. So sure and so structured and proven are we that we have found that there is very little of ourselves in it at all. We have reduced our role to merely acting as a consultant to a musical client that has a naturale structure and real need to be produced and have breath. And we have given ourselves a responsibility to act maturely in helping it carefully come into life. And it’s quite ok for some of us to be that very skillful scribe if you will. For in the end it allows us to be nothing more than a humble audience member like everyone else, and find great inspiration and emotional surprise when it does comes into life for the very first time.

So, in response, I also had a great ComposerBastard day today. I “found” a three voice canon built on tetrachords that created relationships not only horizontally and vertically, but also diagonally from voice to voice using not only the same tetrachord but also with three other embedded trichords. Then I used some permutations of rhythmic cells for each voice that I just as willfully mathematically constructed over the past two weeks.

At first I didn’t think it was all going to fit or hold together. Then it started to work and I thought it was going to sound like shit. But the damn thing ended up working and sounding great. And I never heard a note of the whole thing until it was done. The whole thing was carefully and mathematically (for lack of a better word) worked out for total saturation of these basic elements. I can bring these inner relationship out in orchestration later. Am I a composer then? I don’t feel like one. But I absolutely adore what came out as music all the same, and I don’t make a claim of it coming from “within” at all or I to be any romantic superhero composer from the 20th century. I don’t even claim that I can hear everything in there until I bring it to the surface with outside orchestration. It’s just a lot of painful patient hard work and much ComposerBastard meta-thinking, thats all…big deal. Thai food and puppies are more interesting thoughts for ComposerBastard on Saturday Night.