Three common questions about composing
Over the years I’ve often found that people are surprised and possibly a bit confused when they learn that I write music. Being a songwriter seems quite an understandable activity but the idea of composing instrumental or choral music seems rather less fathomable. However, I’ve noticed that the questions that I get asked about composing tend to boil down to three particular queries which are:
- Why do you compose?
- Where do your ideas come from?
- How do you know what notes to write?
Why do you compose?
This is an interesting question. I’ve always wondered if there is a hint of
“There is so much good music out there from great composers – why are you bothering to write some as well?”
On the other hand, though, maybe people are just genuinely interested in what drives someone to write music.
I’ve pondered how to respond to this question for years and then chanced upon an elegant answer from the American novelist Thomas Berger (1924–2014). He was asked Why do writers write? and his response exactly mirror my feelings about composing music:
“Because it isn’t there.”
I’ve always had an innate drive to hear music that, as far as I know, doesn’t exist, so it’s up to me to find it or create it. Which leads on to the second question…
Where do your ideas come from?
Ideas for music simply come from our imagination. This may be stimulated by events or experiences in our lives but ultimately I find that my best ideas for music often crop up when I’m doing something else: driving to work or taking a shower, for instance.
It might be a musical phrase, style, groove or structure that pops into our minds – I guess that it’s the result of the subconscious beavering away on a challenge without us realising it!
One aspect of generating new ideas that’s always intrigued me is whether we find the music or we construct it. Is composition an act of archaeology or architecture?
In his hybrid memoir and writing manual On Writing, published in 2000, Stephen King describes this distinction when considering where his stories come from.
“When, during the course of an interview for The New Yorker, I told the interviewer that I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground, he said that he didn’t believe me. I replied that that was fine, as long as he believed that I believe it. … Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground as intact as possible.”
Some pieces of music feel exactly like archaeology – all the composer has to do is carefully unearth the notes from the ground where they have existed for eternity. Other pieces of music, and particularly long and complex works, may require more above-ground, architectural thinking as we conceive of the overall structure and shape and then seek to achieve it by means of material we have discovered or crafted.
Of all the music I’ve written, the piece that emerged the most quickly and easily was my setting of God be in my head, written over the course of about 20 minutes in January 2003. The whole piece just popped out in one go and I haven’t altered a note since then. Apart from one chord on the word at in the very last phrase.
For some unknown reason, this chord eluded me for several years until the eventual solution, shown above, finally came to me.
So, as Stephen King said: “…it’s probably impossible to get the entire fossil out of the ground without a few breaks and losses.”
Our job as composers is to hide the joins…
How do you know what notes to write?
This element of composition is possibly the easiest to assess – writing the right notes is a function of practice, experience, training, knowledge, insight and maybe a little wisdom. All of these aspects are useful but subservient to the first one – the only way to become a better composer is to keep on composing. Through that practice we learn more ways to achieve our musical goals and, hopefully, to communicate with our audience as effectively as possible.