166: How to Become a Composer II

Eclectic Bugle? Ew!

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune was submitted by Listener Jeremy. The only hints I could give you about this composer would be way too revealing, which is a hint in itself.

As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at toneprose@substack.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing.

Last Week’s Results
Tone Prose 165
Franck, Psyché et Eros

Joey jumped in first by correctly identifying the time frame as 1850-1910 (the piece is from 1888), and guessed Berlioz, Rimsky, and Mahler. Listener Jeremy took the ball and ran with it, guessing that the clip was French, and he went with D’Indy (as close as you can get without being right), Fauré, Saint-Saëns and Gounod. Listener Eric agreed with them both, adding Magnard and Roussel to the pile (plus Delius.) But it was Listener Laurie who recognized the hallmarks of Franck’s style and named the composer.

But I’m totally burying the lede here, because we had a write-in response from none other than OG Classical Gabfest co-host Dr. Tiffany Lu! Tiffany writes: “This piece is etched into my eternal memory because (if you’ll recall) I got interrogated about my love, or more accurately, my lust life, while on the podium at my first summer at the Pierre Monteux School.”

Let me explain a bit: our former conducting teacher, the late Michael Jinbo, was a big fan of playing the psychiatrist with the student on the podium. If a piece of music was “about” an erotic subject, it was a fair expectation that, in the hunt for expressivity, Maestro Jinbo would go hunting for personal details in a “method acting” kind of approach. Sometimes it could go too far, but mostly it was fun and entertaining, and I do indeed recall this particular moment.

Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!

Head to our Google Form to submit a YouTube link OR upload your own 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.

Comp Lesson

There weren’t any classical-music news items this week that I found particularly inspiring, so I thought I’d use this space to follow up on Tone Prose 160 from this past September, in which I expounded on some of the themes and ideas that I’ve been developing as a teacher of composition. (I’m premiering a big new piece this week, so I guess this is also a way of psyching myself up by pretending I know what I’m doing in this realm.)

Write Through Your Influences

This is a tip that, as far as I know, all but the most psychopathically deranged composition teachers endorse.

The idea is that, when you’re starting out, you should not expect much from yourself in the way of artistic individuality, and that’s ok. Your personal voice is something you have to find, and you can only find it by writing in the style of the music that you like. Your taste will develop your style.

Of course, the danger for the budding composer is that they never transcend the derivative. Here’s the truth: most composers do not transcend the derivative. From our 21st-century vantage point, we tend to think that to be a composer means to be a musician of singular vision and originality. And in fact, that is what it means to be a classical composer, i.e. a composer of classics that transcend their era and live into the modern day. But make no mistake, most of the music that has been written, including in the 18th and 19th centuries, has ended up in the dustbin of history.

However, I do have a practical solution for the budding composer who wishes to break through to something more individual: play, sing, study, and — crucially — listen to as much music as possible. I especially advise listening to obscure music, for one simple reason: if you write music that is derivative of obscure musicians, nobody will know!

That sounds flip, but there’s a bit of wisdom to it. A lot of the time, composers deserve their obscurity, but some composers became obscure through happenstance or “not being at the right place at the right time.” More importantly, sometimes composers didn’t make it through the sieve of history in spite of the fact that they might have had some really daring, interesting, or original ideas, but they just couldn’t quite bring them all off.

One such case is the music of Luís de Freitas Branco. He wrote four symphonies, and none of them is totally satisfying. But within each symphony, there is magic.

The other concept is synthesis: not just writing in the style of one of your influences, but trying to synthesize or fuse the styles of multiple composers. For example, the piece that I’m premiering this weekend, a setting of the Dies Irae, is my attempt to fuse the styles of Stephen Sondheim and Alfred Schnittke. (One could say this is my ongoing artistic project in life.)

However, in the 21st century, this leads to a major conundrum.

The Modern (Anti-)Haydn Paradox

Franz Joseph Haydn earned his reputation as history’s most innovative musical genius by creating the “dramatic style” of musical composition, in which radically contrasting musical ideas proceed from one to the next. He reduced the friction in this new brand of musical “rhetoric” by the use of identifiable melodic motives in each of the textures.

Now, I say “radically contrasting” advisedly, because let’s be honest: how much contrast can you really muster from a musical language based on V-I cadences and a petite instrumentarium? Not all that much! But what Haydn wrung out of the prevailing musical language was a miracle unto itself, and he did it over and over and over again.

Composers today are in a very different place. If you take my advice and listen broadly across genres and eras, you’re going to hear some truly radical contrasts, and if you try to make a new dramatic style by pitting, say, emo ska against Mongolian throat singing, you might come up with something genius, but I’d say the likelihood is less than 5%.

So this is the problem today: an overabundance of influence. And this is where I think a teacher of composition can be really helpful. Hopefully a good teacher will open up new avenues of listening and exploration to their students, but it’s just as important (if not more so) to inculcate a sense of taste.

There have been a few really successful polystylistic composers, and I admire them greatly: Leonard Bernstein, Alfred Schnittke, and Luciano Berio come immediately to mind, but there are plenty of others. They all had in common a certain audacity, but they also had a great set of tools to work with when forging these unlikely bonds between different musics.

A Few More Tips

As I did in the first edition of this series, I’ll end with a few pithy tips (to be expanded upon later.)

1. Just because you’ve written an ending doesn’t mean you’re finished writing the piece.

2. Kill your darlings.

3. The opening of a piece should tell the audience what they’re in for: it introduces the scope and the pace.

4. You should know what your new piece will sound like with about 90% certainty.

Tone Praise

Federico Mompou, Cancion y Danza No. 6

The “cancion” is such a sad, beautiful little work. Great for a rainy November day in Seattle. The “danza” really cooks.

Tone Prose is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)