Advice for Beginning Composers 

This helps, thankyou.

I love this comment. The idea of “being unique” always scared me away from creating art, but once I found this mindset I have never been more sure of my creations.

Great insight!

underrated comment, this kind of thinking helped me make my first record

The best way to find your own voice is to consciously imitate models (look at Ravel) and how your own work differs from the model: that will be YOUR voice. Don't try to be original!

You should check out Tan Dun! He’s a Chinese-American composer, and in a lot of his musicn he combines Chinese traditional with Western classical. His “Crouching Tiger Cello Concerto” and “Fire Ritual” are great pieces to get you started with his music.

how did it go?

Gostaria de te ouvir. Estou entrando no mundo da composição. Muitas dúvidas e ninguém pra falar sobre

i also felt a sense of guilt that i had been primarily writing more disco-inspired works (an important genre to me, as it had some roots in lgbt culture) when the music everyone around me had been writing and playing were modern (and often very spiky and dissonant) works, and i rarely ever wrote using sheet music. i love classical music, but i just felt like dedicating my future to that area in entirety was something i had to do. i definitely feel a bit more brave and confident after watching this!

I think the most important thing is to listen to a lot of different music in order to have your own style

LOL Chopin! You look ready for COVID-19

I did something similar in late 2017: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-9NlSM9JWdkY.html

If seriously pressed, I would pick Charles Ives as my favorite composer, but my tastes more broadly run towards 20th century non-serialists.

@@ClassicalNerd gotta respect Ives for doing what he liked. (of course he had the financial wherewithal to do just that)

Funny thing is atonality is fundamentally stupid. Based on a false premise - that the 12 tones can be treated equally. Makes sense - musicians are generally not much good at counting past 4. If it were a good technique for writing great music then at least one great piece would have been written using it. The visual arts didn't follow such a ridiculous path Fauvism ,Cubism, Surrealism etc actually reached the public and are now part of our culture. 12-tone music....stayed in school.

I offer private lessons. Email me: nerdofclassical [at] gmail.com

@@rockyelmore i remember some yourube video. I allready used the whole tone scale a lot, nearly the same.

I'd prefer a beard if it grew on my cheeks to any extent.

@@ClassicalNerd I feel you :( ah, genes...

I-and _many_ composers before me-make a key distinction between composition _techniques_ (what you're talking about) and composition itself. You can teach someone to write in English but they're not going to be Shakespeare because it takes some creativity, which can be helped along by techniques but cannot be taught itself.

@@ClassicalNerd This could get lengthy but I will say I disagree strongly and musicians error horribly on the side of immaturity on this topic. Sure there is a distinction between pure spontaneous creativity (the kind you wake up from a dream & write down; which also can be Taught!) and technique. Creativity can be taught itself, and there's plenty of research into creativity & creative process to back this position, there is no artificial limit on "oh, Some people are creative, and others aren't, oops, if you're not one of the born-gifted ones, you're out of luck." (As well, there are close ties in western music tradition to white supremacy and purposely incorrect genetic theory.) There are also ways to measure novelty or artistry in any work and thus either add more or less which is essentially 'showing creativity'. If I write 'boring classical music' which seems to have no life to it, then add multiple tonicizations and a modulation, suddenly it appears 'highly creative' to anyone else. Shakespeare is not a good example because he was such a genius he literally invented English. Look at someone like Hemingway who had a simple grammar style yet profound composition skills. It is relatively straightforward to write a highly creative novel somewhat as good as Hemingway, there are even contests to do so. How is it possible? Because English composition educators (compared to Music educators) actually teach composition, teach "HOW to write," rather than give fake excuses & "fake compositional processes" like: "Read some words, how does it sound to you, when you read the page, is it enjoyable? Just experiment with different words and word order and word choices until your speaking of the words aloud starts to sound good to your ear. Don't try to write the words down first or understand the grammar that you're writing, just pick some different words to add in." No English composition instructor would ever say that. It's juvenile, it's idiocy. But music educators say it all the time, daily, weekly, and it is wrong, and harmful. I don't care what "many composers before me" said, they are wrong too. Very wrong. Long-dead people used to believe any number of wrong things about the world, and the music world, composing world, and especially vocal performance world, is fuuuuuulll of invalid & moronic ideas. The fact that music composition textbooks even in the 1960's were still stating "Is it possible to teach composition? Perhaps not," shows the mentally backwards nature of academia's music educators. There's a huge difference between saying "oh, ANYONE can write music" which is not the case, someone with very low mental or auditory abilities for it, or low discipline, will likely not be able to do it, vs. saying "Composition CAN'T be taught at all" which is straight nonsense (bordering on genetic bias as I hinted at).

I appreciate your enthusiasm and I agree that there are fundamental issues in the way music is conceived and taught (which is a big reason I started this channel)-however, I still make a key distinction between music composition techniques and innate compositional creativity. You could be tone-deaf and learn the rules of contrapuntal motion-heck, you could write a computer program to do just that!-and it doesn’t mean that the next Palestrina or Bach is going to pop out as a result of that experiment. Likewise, you can make someone’s writing better, but I don’t think people being able to learn to copy Hemingway’s style is a good argument-after all, people learn to copy the style of different composers all the time, and that doesn’t mean that those musicians have a definitive compositional language or style to call their own. I feel like you’ve had some bad experiences with music educators. Most composition lessons I’ve had (or given) focus on the whys: why certain things work, why this other thing doesn’t, why this sounds out of place, why this sounds well-balanced, et cetera. There are usually concrete reasons as to why certain things work and the art of learning composition is the art of being able to hear your work from a third-party perspective.

@@ClassicalNerd Machine learning algorithms which produced Bach chorals passed the expert musician listening test as being actually written by Bach. This was accomplished over 5 years ago so the tech has likely become 1000% better since then. So now you'll have to wrestle with the question of whether AI are being creative, as well as whether humans are being creative. Mimicking a style (including the Hemingway example, many of those genre writers Creating excellent novellas on their own merit) is not an indication of lack of creativity (even given the bad quote, "great artists steal") so now you are in a pickle with your rigid perspective. "Creativity can't be taught" or "Fill-in-the-blank can't be taught" actually translates to: "I don't know how to teach fill-in-the-blank likely because I don't understand it myself." Somewhere in 200-300-year old Philosophy writings on the essence of knowledge, that is a well-accepted statement (Kant? I forget ,but doubtless Music educators seem clueless to other fields and so promote harmful mythology). And yes I have and continue to have a lot of music educators which range from horrible to lackluster, one reason being, they insist on pushing "creativity" ala "just write what sounds good to you" instead of learning actually practical harmony and/or counterpoint writing.

“Actually practical harmony and/or counterpoint writing” is a _major_ part of a composer’s training, especially in a conservatory setting. Some institutions make you do this _before_ you actually get formal lessons, as they are integral to the formulation of a toolbox of compositional techniques. I recently had a phenomenally interesting conversation with another RU-vid music educator about (among other things) the nature of teaching composition, which I think you would find interesting (or, perhaps, passionately disagree with). It’ll be my next published video. Again, specific techniques _can_ be taught, but the way in which two different composers will, if given the same exact toolbox of techniques, assemble them into a coherent and emotionally affective whole is _remarkably_ different. Figuring out a way to reverse-engineer Bach is not going to approach the sublime subtleties which make Bach special, which include his personal choices in regards to breaking “rules,” and where and how to deploy various techniques. I think less of chorale writing (in which voice-leading is fairly standard) and more in, say, _The Art of Fugue._ If you think that all composition lessons are is an encouragement of a “write what sounds good” approach, then I deeply lament your experience in lessons. The best lessons I’ve ever had are the ones where _really_ probing questions were asked of me, and where the professor drilled and critiqued and questioned the place of _every note_ and _every phrase_ in order to make sure that the product I have brought into the lesson is both as good as it can be _and_ lives up to my own conception of the music. The best professors are strict, making sure that I can justify _everything_ I put on the page, and that’s a high bar to hit, but it makes one’s creative work _better._ It’s the _exact opposite_ of your description, which you falsely claim to be some kind of universal truth.