On Being Fully Committed With Your Music

Photo by Ed SchipulOccasionally I teach private lessons in composition, which it turns out is one of the best ways to learn and improve on my own writing. Explaining a particular concept or technique helps bring it back to my attention and solidify the idea in my mind.Among the many problems that my students have with their work (including low production value, rambling, using too many ideas at once, etc.), perhaps the most significant is a lack of commitment to their ideas.By this I mean that their “loud” and “quiet" moments are both just kind of medium. Their chord “progressions” are static and don’t go anywhere. Their “fast and driving” tempo is more like a walking pace.There is a lack of commitment to what they are trying to say, or at least what they think they are saying. Whatever it is they are attempting to express, they just don’t seem to be getting there.I think that things should be pushed to the extreme limits on either side. Your loud moments should be deafening, your quite moments should require effort to hear. The dark chords should make you quiver. The fast tempos should leave your catching your breathe, and the slow tempos should drag you down, longing for the next beat to hurry up and come already.Otherwise you are left with gray. Medium. Dull. Boring. And as one composition teacher told me years ago, there is no greater sin in music than to be boring.In many cases the source of the problem seems to be shyness or embarrassment. The student feels that it’s “cheesy” or “over the top” to go all out. I think it all comes down to two things: getting out of your own head, and fear.Back when I was his assistant, one of the greatest lessons I learned from Michael Levine was on this very topic. He was listening through composer demos and becoming exasperated. "Everything is just too safe and boring", he complained. And then he pointed out a specific moment. “Hear that big drum? It seems like the composer has this idea in their mind that they just pounded out a huge beat with a powerful drum. But what did you hear? More like thud. But they are so stuck in their head that in their imagination it’s a big moment. They need to get out of their heads and actually LISTEN to what it sounds like. It shouldn’t sound like thud, it should sound like BOOM."His point was that what you hear in your head needs to actually meet what you’ve actually put down on paper/screen. This is the reason so many people submit horrible MIDI orchestral mockups and think it sounds like music. They have gotten so used to the idea in their own mind that a certain sound “is supposed to sound like an oboe” that they’ve lost touch with the fact that it sounds like a bad synthesizer. And more specific to this post, they have gotten so used to the idea that their tempo is supposed be fast, or the drums are supposed to be loud, that they have lost touch with what is actually playing back at them from their monitors.That problem is the easier of the two to solve. It takes practice and focus, but you can develop a skill for listening to what you are creating, instead of just imagining what it represents. The more difficult problem to solve is the fear of making those big gestures in the first place.Fear is such an important topic that I will save that one for another day.