Way back in my undergraduate days, so we’re talking the bones and decrepit ruins of dinosaur land, there was composition workshop, and the less said about that sad attempt to crush the spirit, inventiveness, and personality out of our collective music-student souls the better, but I’m already drifting way off into the sunset, and this is only the first sentence, and it is already wildly out of control. How many conjunctions is that? Good grief.
I’ll begin again.
Way back in the forgotten depths of dinosaur land that was my undergraduate education, those of us with composition or electronic music majors had to take composition workshop. In principle, this was a good idea. We got to explore ideas. We listened to each other’s attempts to create music, and we got instructor feedback. In execution, one’s results could vary wildly, depending on how quickly we realized the teachers were not so much trying to help us find our unique and individual voices as smash us into preexisting shapes, and oh good grief, I’m drifting again.
I’m not starting over. I’m not editing. This all goes in the final.
There was a composition major. I was electronic music. It was my backdoor into the music program because I did not have nearly enough of a musical upbringing to pass muster. I couldn’t even read music until I was about 17 years old. The intro to music teacher at community college said I had a vocal range of about a major sixth. I couldn’t play a musical instrument to save my life, and the music advisor at the four-year university I finally got into didn’t want to sign the form that would let me into the program. He said I wouldn’t last one semester, and he didn’t want me to come crying to him about how hard it was. I stared that motherfucker down. He finally signed the form, and I’ve got a goddamn masters in music composition to show for it, thank you very much.
It was a sucky degree from a sucky school coasting on a reputation at least ten years out of date, but all of this is beside the point. Good grief, I’m seriously drifting again.
Right, there was a composition major in composition workshop, and he would include things in the pieces he would bring to workshop that could charitably be described as impractical. For example, and this was definitely my favorite, for one passage, he wanted 57 bassoons. My memory is hazy. It may have been 56 oboes, and only for a couple of bars, and then they were done. I mean, goodness, ten points for effort and creativity, but surprisingly impractical.
The creatively bankrupt and otherwise soul-dead teacher said in response to this revelation words more-or-less to the effect of “In god’s name why?”
And the comp major would attempt to muster his thoughts and would eventually say something about precompositional ideas. This would happen a lot. I don’t mean there were that many moments of impressive ambition. I mean the words “precompositional idea” came up a lot whenever the comp major’s work in progress was being reviewed. The guy was hung up on it. When the teacher asked if he had considered this or that change or would maybe consider another couple of notes, the comp major would say it was out of the question. He wouldn’t change it because of the precompositional ideas underlying the piece.
This stuck with me: precompositional ideas.
If they were impractical, you could back yourself into quite the corner.
Okay, sure, start with ideas. Have plans.
But—my god—you have to be able to bend with the times, which is quickly sounding less and less like a good way to word this.
When the ideas crash face first into reality, you have to be able to work with that and adapt.
You have to be able to work and think and listen and feel your way through it. Ideas are guideposts. They are not walls. They’re here to help you, not chain you down.
Which is all a very long-winded way of saying that I don’t tend to use precompositional ideas.
It’s something I noticed as far back as my community college English 1A days. I could not write to an outline, or to be more specific, it took me a very, very long time to write to an outline. If there was only a vague notion, if I could “wing it”, so to speak, things went much better. There’s something in my creative nature that hates—just absolutely hates—being locked into ideas, outlines, precompositional claptrap.
So I try not to over think what I’m going to do. Sure, I’ll take notes. I’ll sketch things out, but I will only do this with the understanding that none of it is locked. It may have been written down, but it was only a thought, an idea, something I might reference later. The notes might not be referenced ever again.
I don’t want to force the message, the meaning, the intent. I don’t want to hammer it, causing blunt force trauma.
Intent doesn’t matter. It’s secondary to impact. The audience is going to think or feel what they are going to think or feel, and I don’t want to get in the way of that.
If you are focused exclusively on the precompositional stuff, then any hope of impact is muddled or lost.
This does tend to mean I don’t know what the work is about until after I’ve finished it and I’m going back through it. I may have started with an idea or thought or feeling, but I don’t know if that’s where I’ve wound up. I have to go back through it and wonder.
I worry this means I repeat myself a lot. Themes, feelings, and ideas getting recycled over and over again by my subconscious. I also worry what I’m revealing about myself by deliberately trying not to control where the work is going.
I don’t worry that much.
It’s far more important that the work be what it needs and wants to be rather than where I thought it should have gone. The Urban Goatherds, for example, bears very little resemblance to what I thought it was going to be. I thought it was going to be silly and bawdy. I was not expecting a work about alienation, depression, intergenerational trauma, and grief. I was not expecting found families.
The next one—name redacted for now—also appears to be about intergenerational trauma, toxic families, and the sadness that goes from not being able to escape from them. This was not planned. It was supposed to be silly. It was supposed to be bawdy, absurd, and ridiculous.
This is what comes from not locking down those precompositional ideas, I suppose.