A short stretch of road just outside Philadelphia becomes my favorite place around November. This short video capturing the beautiful colors of Fall is soundtracked by a segment of an unfinished orchestral piece I am currently writing.
Category Archives: Composing
Decomposing: What Would Bach Do?
Music theory courses are filled with rules. “You have to learn the rules to break them,” is what young composers are told when they hand-in homework assignments overflowing with parallel fifths and doubled leading tones. Those assignments inevitably come back with the words “What would Bach do?” tattooed across the manuscripts in bright red ink.
We like to compare our compositional output to Bach’s extensive collection of perfection, since he so obviously did things right. Everybody loves Bach, and who can blame them? A Counterpoint professor of mine would talk about Bach like he was an old bar buddy that he would drink with on Thursday afternoons. Another faculty member created special “What would Bach Do?” bumper stickers for all his students to be placed on their old beat-up jeeps, cello cases and Macbook Pros. The only thing left would have been to write-up tickets for those who carelessly broke the laws of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Bach created beautiful music, but music wouldn’t be an art without exploration and development. Sorry Bach, sometimes you have to break the rules. We modernized-Americans cheat on our diets, loiter in front of convenient stores, drive over the speed limit, and yes, occasionally omit the 3rd when harmonizing a chord.
We do need to formulate guidelines for good music based on what’s been done that works, in order to build a foundation for compositional practices. Guidelines are simply important for structure, and a good way to ground your approach to a piece. Thoughts and ideas, however, should never be bound by universal laws.
A Fugue a Day Keeps a Composer at Bay
I reflect on simpler days when the plans I set for myself carried themselves with little weight, and stuck together in an organized manner. Time was allotted a specific allowance in order to move on, however slow or fast the gait. But as the plans I once had form a tight mold around each and every possible direction, the only way I can seem to make sense of the scenery is to manifest structure according to the most basic of principles. Life will only move in the direction you want if you guide it yourself.
It’s very easy to get lost; in fact I don’t know one person who hasn’t been lost at one point or another. Occasionally the act of getting lost will help us find a new direction, or help re-find who we are. But when it comes to following a path, it sure helps to have the will, motivation, and stamina to step on, step off, step back and move forward along that path with an open mind. Knowing what you want is not always easy, but keeping your head on straight is usually the best way to re-discover what is probably already there.
Humans are amazing. We can trick our minds into believing that we have a sense of purpose. That sounds bad, but I mean it in a good way. We create our own purpose and should embrace that fact. Our days are exactly what we let them become, or force them to become, and that should be reason enough to want to do it all over again the next day. So how to accomplish the day in our 21st century modernized America? We prioritize, sure, but we also structure ourselves within boundaries that help to keep us focused, like habits. After all, schedules are what get us through the day.
- Bach hard at work.
Something we often forget is how to turn our hobbies and our passions into habit. The first step in having any sort of meaningful relationship with what you’re passionate about is forming daily habits. I once had an assignment for class where I was required to write a fugue everyday – following in the mind-foot-steps of many great composers. This was to instill habit-forming practices for our craft. I conjured up images of Bach dragging himself out of his bed and sitting at the kitchen table with a pen in one hand, manuscript in the other, and a bowl of cheerios in front of him, writing a canon as if it was the step before brushing his teeth. Yes cheerios, why can’t Bach like them too – he might’ve should’ve wanted to have kept his cholesterol down too. He did have time to write prolifically I suppose, as it was part of his job description. This was also a time period in which composers and musicians didn’t have to supplement their craft with a second or third profession just to pay the bills in order to allow them what they needed to keep writing and playing. Times are different, but the process of perfecting your craft has not changed – so make time for it as best you can.
I didn’t think I had the patience inside me to write a fugue everyday – I thought it to be an impossible task considering everything else I had in my schedule – but it taught me a valuable lesson about time management. As long as there is something you want to do, all you really need to do is make time for it. Stretch your schedule and cut time off other tasks. There is really no excuse for not doing something other than doubting that it will be accomplished. It was important to me, so I followed through.
I wrote a fugue a day for about 4 months. That’s about 3.5 months longer than the assignment called for, but I liked how it fed my dedication to develop. Most of the 7am eyes-half-open pieces were just subjects and expositions, as I only wrote full pieces around the ideas I liked best (even then, I developed those more than a year later). But the point remained to initiate ideas and keep my creative juices flowing.
Maintaining creativity in your daily routine works your brain in wonderful ways. It heightens critical thinking and boosts your overall mood. I recommend it to anyone. It helps you grow, plain and simple. It’s often hard to keep up the challenge simply because the fun often has a tendency to turn to chore – a tedious scientific-like trial-and-error procedure. Not to mention all the stuff that’s on TV these days.
Each day that I wrote a new fugue it became easier, but it ultimately forced more terrible music out of my brain than good. But as I pretend to always have said, “you have to wade through 95% of bad ideas to get to the 5% of good ideas”. It’s more a matter of practicing and perfecting your craft in order to decrease that ratio. Constant writing helped my music become better and my ideas more interesting, and I definitely became faster at writing bad music. But, to use a real quote from a totally real person: In order to write good music, you have to write bad music too.
