The Composer as Performer












"I am disturbed that Gosfield doesn't place the acquisition of musical (esp. instrumental) technique at the top of her list. Ever since it became acceptable to be a "accredited" composer and not a performing musician (thanks to universities which began issuing degrees in "composition"), "composers" have given us music which is not worth the paper it is written on.

Young composers should spend more time being performing musicians and less time hatching half-brained works which the public is invariably going to hate. I liken the contempory composer to a chef who conjures up recipes without ever having set foot in a kitchen.

Having listened to "Lightning Slingers and Dead Ringers" (2008) is it clear that Gosfield has a good command of the piano: young composers should aspire to the same level of proficiency. If your instrument is the computer, then please don't compose for acoustic instruments."
- Desabata. Hamburg, Germany

I deeply agree with the above idea that we composers need to aspire to master instruments.

Our greatest influence is the voice, from which in the tongue which we speak, we find our most subtle musical phrases. The next is the rhythm with which we move through life, our dance. After that are the instruments we play and lastly the ambient sounds of railroad trains, steam kettles and catbirds which inhabit our personal worlds. Somewhere in the mix, of course, are all the other compositions that have beautifully or obnoxiously invaded our ears. (My order here is quite arbitrary and may be skewed.)

The instruments we play and to the degree we master them, are frustrated by their limits, alter them, imagine them just beyond what they can do, and push and struggle against them for perfection, become our internal tools of composition. "Break your instrument," Casals.

Whether adjusting the pitch for cello notes higher or lower within a piece's harmonic and step considerations or getting a piano sound like other various instruments as did Horowitz, or altering the emphasis of notes as did Rachmaninoff for others' piano works, we learn.

Modern composers are generally strong in getting feedback from musicians as to how to stretch their instruments in new ways. If there is not first however, the deep, subtle connection to wonderful music playing of these or another instrument by the composer herself, the adjustment is only a parlor trick, an "Ah, ouuh, look at my cleverness," not something deeper.

The greatest composers were among the greatest performers. And I imagine, this will continue to be.

Advice to Young Composers











"The composers you admire didn’t get where they are by imitating others. Inspiration and influence are a far cry from imitation, so listen, observe, and then dig deeper to find your own music."
- Annie Gosfield

"I am not in any way a specialist in any kind of music. I am what might be called an ordinary, general listener. In that very limited capacity I would give one piece of advice to young musicians. Try to understand the kind of music which has given people, and still gives people real pleasure, true joy in listening. Understand then that in order to truly give something in music it might be necessary to speak in a vocabulary which most of mankind is capable of understanding and enjoying. Touch the heart and soul of human beings, and avoid empty technical achievements which even computers will not hum along with."
- Shalom Freedman, in response to an article by Annie Gosfield

In my way of thinking, the way to approach composing is to write beautiful music that touches the soul and uplifts it, encourages people to live a little higher up the chakra tree than before, be more caring and giving and thoughtful.

But composers want to make something new. They believe that this is a measure of having achieved a great stature. It is.

However, one should not aim at being original. That comes naturally from the process of being great at doing what has been done before. Doing it over and over and honing your talent until one day your work actually becomes something new without that being the goal.

I don't mind being old fashioned, Bach was considered old fashioned during the years he was writing. I would rather follow him.

Composers write at the level they are at in their personal lives, they relate to that level. The music of the rapper, for example is one of aggression and survival at any cost, down at the lowest chakra level called survival. That is where many people are comfortable and rap music affirms their feelings. Other musics fit people at other levels. Much of popular music is about the ego, getting things, especially getting (or wanting or the sadness of loosing, etc.) a romantic relationship, which is on a bit higher plane than "survival." The music of Bach is from a composer who, and for an audience which, are less comfortable living on that level and more comfortable with a more advanced spiritual level.

Experimental composers mostly relate to the world which is now sadly discordant, polluted, overpopulated and at war. Of course, this shows in their music. How to make them cringe? Tell them their work is sweet and warms you.

But it is more than the world situation which creates a "modern composer."

Their writing is often a reaction to too much exposure to mediocre and saccharine sweet classical performances, often the composer's own. When a composer who is middling at best on her instrument spends hours and hours, years and years, playing his guitar or cello and it doesn't hit the quality of beauty of say, Segovia or Casals (and in fact is boring), the composer turns to something else to erase the experience of that bland music which deadens the soul.

Having to sit through some very uninspired piano music last week sent me straight to my own piano to improvise extreme discord with some resolution. If the composer has sat at her piano for years of her own tedious practice and dull piano lessons, she needs to react to that.

If the composer tries to write the exercises at music school and finds that her work is flat and dead compared to what Faure or Schubert did in their school work when they wrote their Ave Marias, what is she going to do but try something else? If the composer, realizes somewhere in her heart of hearts that in writing traditional music, she will become at best, a workaday, mediocre composer, she will turn to the avant garde. That way it feels creative and exciting and the quality of her music can't be measured against Beethoven and Haydn.

Nadia Boulanger, the most influencial music teacher of the past century taught just about everyone: Quincy Jones, Gian Carlos Menotti, Ned Rorem, Walter Piston, Astor Piazzolla, Aaron Copeland, Burt Bacharach, Leondard Bernstein, Daniel Barenboim, John Adams, and two I would like to now contrast, George Gershwin and Philip Glass.

George Gershwin went to Ms. Boulanger to hone his compositional skills. She told him that while he might not understand all of technical aspects, she did not want to teach them to him because he had a quality that she did not want to ruin. She knew he would produce wonderful music.

Philip Glass also went to Ms. Boulanger in Paris to improve as a composer after studying first at Julliard. He said he wasn't very good at traditional composing so he turned to minimalism.

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it".
- C. S. Lewis