10 Essential Lessons for Composers
When I first started composing, there were many things that I didn't know about the art form that I wish someone more experienced had told me at the time, so that I could have a more flexible approach to the art form. so that I wasn't so severe with myself, and so that I wasn't constantly judging every single thing that I did. My overall growth as a musician and as a composer would have been a lot smoother, with a lot fewer bumps along the way.
That’s why I'm going to give you ten things that I wish I knew ten years ago that would have helped me to become a better composer.
If you're new to this blog, my name is Mathew Arrellín. I'm a composer and cellist, and I got my PhD in music composition at Northwestern University. I also founded the Sound Painters Studio, which is an online community for composers who are looking to take their music to the next level. You can actually get 1 free session in my exclusive online masterclasses by joining the waitlist!
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On this site, you can find content on how to write for cello, music composition, you can find my music. And I've also done a handful of Dorico tutorials over on YouTube for folks who have been transitioning from Finale to Dorico.
If there are questions that you have about composition, theory, or Dorico, shoot me a message and I'll see if I can cover them in a future blog post.
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Lesson #1: Don’t Let Music Theory Stop You
Don't let a perceived lack of theory knowledge prevent you from composing.
When I started my undergraduate studies at the University of New Mexico, I spent two years under the impression that I had to go through the two year music theory sequence before I could even start composing, and so I always regretted that.
I basically lost two years of my life that I could have spent composing and learning by doing, and I spent them instead just trying to learn the basic fundamentals of music theory, which in the end, didn't even apply in my music because I started doing things that were just not within the scope of what I was learning in those theory classes.
The main thing that I need to emphasize here is that you don't need to have studied music theory to start composing now.
Yes, there's going to be some resistance from some readers that say, “Music theory is what you need to actually refine your craft and your technique, and to be able to understand more complex concepts as a composer.”
And I agree with that to a certain degree. I do think that music theory gives you some tools in your toolbox, and it will help you to understand some fundamental concepts that can be adapted in many different musical domains. However, there are also really great examples of musicians and composers in the past who never took a single music theory class.
One of the best examples that I like to give is the guitarist of The Mars Volta, one of my favorite bands, who also happens to be from my hometown of El Paso, Texas.
The guitarist’s name is Omar Rodríguez López, and he's one of the most inventive songwriters and one of the most prolific songwriters that I can think of. He has over 50 solo albums that you can find online, which is insane in and of itself, and in his band, The Mars Volta, you'll find a lot of different kinds of experiments with sounds like some are more experimental, like musique concrète kind of approaches to music.
There're also elements like Afro-Caribbean percussion and Latin influences, such as salsa, there's punk, there's prog, there's hardcore music, and so much more. There are all of these different interesting intersections between musical genres that coexist to create something that's extremely personal and which no other band, to my knowledge, has been able to achieve at that same level, and I think it's because of his very unique approach to sound and music.
He's never studied music theory in his life. You can find videos interviews where he says:
“I'm not a musician. I mean, I never took a class. I'm just a person who likes stuff. I never have done it, you know what I mean? I guess I just, I will pick something up, and then I use whatever I can to my advantage to make up for the fact that I know nothing.”
What he writes comes from a different place. He doesn't need theory to actually explore and experiment with music.
Another aspect is that he's also an active filmmaker, so he has a different artistic discipline that's informing some of the choices he’s making musically.
I remember seeing an interview where he described the fact that he thinks about music sometimes like film editing, where you juxtapose different elements or different visuals, different storylines, etc., to create interesting trajectories or dynamics within the sound.
I love that!
There may be things that you are extremely interested in, which have nothing to do with music or sound that can actually influence and inspire you to create something much more personal and much more profound without ever having studied music theory. So yes, I do think music theory is going to help you to understand certain techniques and certain technical aspects of sound and music, but it's not mandatory, and it's actually more important that you just start learning by doing.
Lesson #2: Don’t Let Music Theory Become a Cage
Once you actually do go through the steps of learning music theory, if that's important to you, don't let it become a cage. Don't let it limit your ideas. Sometimes we think, “well, I've learned all of these different techniques. I've learned all of these different chords, all of these different combinations. So this is what I can do in music.”
it almost takes you out of the original excitement about sound that made you want to become a composer in the first place. You wanted to understand all of these things that were happening in the music that was exciting to you, but this starts to become filtered through the narrow lens and understanding of a very particular kind of musical convention.
And that's all music theory is, right?
Over time, there are certain conventions which occur throughout large bodies of works from various composers that we can generalize and put into boxes. That's how we get species counterpoint. That's how we get 4-part harmony.
Once you get into the 19th century, like romantic harmony for example, a lot of these things start to break down anyway.
You have to be free enough to explore things outside of your realm of understanding. Don't let music theory become a cage.
Lesson #3: Don’t Obsess Over Pitch Structures
This is going to apply especially to composers of concert music—composers of notated music for the concert hall:
Do not become obsessed and don't fetishize pitch structures, because most listeners are not going to hear them anyway unless they have perfect pitch, and even then, it might be a distraction for them from appreciating the other dimensions of the music. There there are so many different layers of the compositional process that you can pay attention to, to make the music interesting and to have a beautiful arc of sound without worrying too much about pitch structures.
Don't become obsessed with trying to create an immaculate and pristine pitch structure because most listeners don't even hear that. Anyways, this is already sort of an old-fashioned concept, a very Beethovenian concept, which may not necessarily apply, particularly if you're writing music that's not in the tonal system or the 12-tone system.
Focus instead on just creating pitch structures which are audible, and this means doing things that are extremely simple.
Maybe that's going from a unison to something that's polyphonic, or maybe that's going from a wall of sound to something that's super reduced, like just three notes. These things are going to be audible. What you're really focusing on in the pitch domain is creating contrast.
So how can you create contrast? How can you make it audible for people who are maybe not even be composers, or maybe people who are not necessarily used to hearing sounds like the ones that you compose?
It's only one layer of the composition itself. Now, I'm not saying to write whatever.
There are ways that you can create interesting trajectories, both from like a theoretical standpoint and from a perceptual standpoint as an audience member. But just make sure that you're focusing on other elements that are of equal importance.
That means focusing on the rhythmic domain, focusing on form, focusing on texture. All of these other elements are going to support the emotional response that a listener might get when listening to your music.
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#4: Focus on Fundamental Concepts
Fundamental concepts in music can be simple things like counterpoint.
What does counterpoint really mean? How can you have counterpoint? Is it in the pitch domain? Is it in the rhythmic domain? Is it in the temporal domain? It can be in any of these different domains.
Do many composition studies where you focus on counterpoint in the pitch domain. What are the aspects of counterpoint that you're trying to understand? Then the focus becomes extremely specific.
When you focus on trying to understand these fundamental concepts within the context of a very small piece. And that's why I say to do composition studies, you're going to internalize them much more. If you focus on a piece that only does rhythmic counterpoint, you're going to internalize the concept. If you focus only on timbral counterpoint. If you focus on only X, you're going to really assimilate that as a tool that can be useful in future pieces. So focus on composition studies of fundamental concepts. Now over time when you start writing larger pieces, your pieces themselves will function as studies of a collection of different concepts, but you have to be really conscious about each of the different individual constituent layers, so that you can start to develop your own vocabulary and grow from piece to piece, and so that you don't get stuck within one specific kind of composition.
That can happen for composers: we can get stuck in a particular idea and just go through phases where we're just repeating ourself, we're not growing, we're not learning and assimilating new techniques because every time we do a new piece, we attempt to solve a thousand different problems instead of focusing on just one single fundamental concept. So that's something that I wish I knew before, is just trying to do these little studies. Don't try to write long pieces.
It's like when I learned how to draw and paint. I would do these exercises of trying to do a gradation from black to white. I just had to do 12 different squares that go from black all the way to white with a pencil. If you're learning how to draw hands, just draw hands, just draw feet, just draw eyes, etc. The purpose was to reinforce my technique.
This is what we can do as composers as well to reinforce our technique.
Lesson #5: Don't let your ego get in the way.
One of the things that can happen for composers is sometimes we get so attached to the results of trying to impress our friends, trying to impress our teachers with our amazing abilities, that sometimes this can actually get in the way of composing.
You have to give yourself the freedom to fail and experiment so that you can actually start to figure out what the limits are of your own personal voice, and what are the things that you're actually interested in.
The problem in the music composition community, especially in the concert music community, is that the stakes for failure are perceived to be really, really high because it takes months to actually compose a piece. It gets performed one time. You get a recording if you're lucky. We then associate the value of the end result to be extremely high, and we don't allow ourselves the freedom to actually fail.
One of the solutions that I have found personally for this problem is to make a lot of different mock-ups and studies and not worry so much about the results.
So you need to have sort of a composition sketchbook that is, again, similar to the visual arts. You just give yourself the freedom to try things. That may mean working more in a DAW and not worrying so much about notation, or maybe that's recording yourself, performing different parts just to try things out and only do like short, one-minute pieces.
Don't try to do long pieces, like 15 to 30-minute works, where you're experimenting with a very large-scale form. Just do something simple. When you have finished that, you can move on. Forget about it. Throw it in the garbage. It's okay if these pieces are not even good. They're just studies. They're just ways of you trying to experiment with ideas and learn more as you go, right? Learn by doing, and do it in a way that makes the most sense, so that you can do it as fast as possible. Sometimes music notation can be a barrier, because if you try to notate some of these things, it could take weeks or months.
By doing these small studies, it also helps you to detach your ego from the results, because there are going to be a bunch of these pieces that you forget even exist, and that's good. We want that. We want to be allowed to forget about these pieces, to not worry about what others think, and we need to be able to advance as a composer without getting in our own way.
So don't let your ego stop you from composing. Don't let concert performances of your music be the only way in which you experience your music, because that's going to put all your eggs in one basket, and that's going to give it a disproportionate amount of value.
Lesson #6: Don’t Worry About Finding Your Voice
A lot of composers are really focused on trying to find their voice and about trying to be personal, about trying to have originality. These things are honestly overrated, and finding your personal voice comes naturally with time.
Even Picasso's earlier paintings look like other artists work. If a great artist like Picasso starts out as a teenager just trying to get his technique down and his work looks similar to other artists, then why should we as composers be worried about trying to find our own personal voice? If we sound like Bach or Beethoven or Xenakis or Penderecki or whoever, it's okay. You can wear your influences on your chest like a badge.
Some of my music sounds a lot like Xenakis. There was a period of time where I was obsessed with Xenakis’ music. It's good to have a strong model because that helps you try to raise yourself to their level, and because you're using some of the same materials and concepts that this composer is using, you're going to sort of start to absorb it through sort of a form of like conceptual osmosis.
That's going to help to improve your technique, and you're going to find that by doing that in your own music, there are certain things which come out that you're more interested in than just the surface-level relationships or observations that you can make between these composers.
Those are the things you're going to focus on, and as you continue this process over a long period of time, you're going to start to naturally just establish your own vocabulary, and that's going to sound more like you than it would like the composer who you drew that thing from in the first place.
#7: Don’t Worry About Copying
We learn through observation and repetition. We learn by re-filtering other things we've heard in life from composers that we like or ideas that interest us. And that's okay. We we need that to be able to actually learn.
Listen to your favorite composers with a highly sensitive ear. Start to figure out the things that are really, really special, but specifically to you, that may not necessarily be special, even to the composer themselves or to other people. There may be just things that jump out at you and see if you can zero in on what those things are and start to experiment with those things as a starting point in your next piece.
For example, if you like a particular sonority that you hear in a Bartók string quartet, what if there was an entire piece that was just about that sonority? Or what if it was just about these XYZ elements?.
This is how we learned as children. This is how we can learn as artists.
Lesson #8: Don't try to write massive symphonic works.
I'm going to reinforce lessons from earlier. Don't try to write massive symphonic works. Don't try to dialog with genres at a really high level. Don't try to write like the next late Beethoven string quartets.
Eventually, these things may emerge naturally, and you may just have ideas which require a much longer time scale, but I would recommend just starting small composition studies. Sketches that you can forget about. Miniatures.
You may not have the tools to be able to write long pieces. Maybe what you need right now is to focus on learning. How can you do something simple and develop it now? I've made content in my YouTube before about how to actually take an idea and give it form.
So if you're interested in that kind of thing, then you can find here:
Focus on composing short pieces that accomplish one thing.
Just do one piece about rhythmic counterpoint and then move on, one piece about timbre melodies, one piece about melodic contour, and constructing a really powerful apex.
Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Be realistic, and play to your strengths.
Lesson #9: Don’t judge your music as you compose it
One of the most important lessons, and this is related to not letting your ego get in the way: Do not judge your music as you compose it.
That should be left for a later stage of composition. It’s not that I'm saying compose uncritically—what I'm saying is, don't actively judge it as you're composing, because this can slow you down if you're constantly second-guessing yourself, or you have a lot of self-doubt about every single decision that you make, and it's going to bottleneck the process and stunt the growth of the materials.
Later on, as you're starting to negotiate how that fits with other sections of the piece, you can start to say, “well, maybe I can adjust this element, or maybe I can modify this particular aspect of this section,” but you don't want to necessarily be doing that as you're actively composing, because something that can happen is like, maybe you had a conversation once with a pianist who said, “oh, I really don't think that composer should do this.”
And then that gets stuck in your mind. And every time you're writing for piano, you think that one person told me this one time that I shouldn't do this and that. That's like cutting off an idea.
If you don't think about that pianist as you're composing, you just try to figure out what the idea wants to do and you let it be more free.
Lesson #10: Don't take critiques personally
This is the last lesson: Don't take critiques personally.
They're not assaults on you as an artist or as a human being.They are just another composer’s perspective into your music from their own unique angle, whether they're more experienced or at your same level. These are just ways that they're trying to lend you the lessons that they have accumulated over the course of the development of their musicianship and their voice as a composer. Don't take it personally.
It could be that their form of communication is a little bit blunt, and it feels more personal. It feels like the way that you should receive it is emotional, but we have to try to detach ourselves from the results so that we can just learn.
Subtract your ego from the equation. Pretend someone else wrote that piece, and imagine that you're being offered a golden nugget about what that person might have learned if they had done X, Y, or Z.
Try to just simply rationalize the feedback and take what's good about it and leave the rest out. You don't need all of it. It could be that one particular aspect of the feedback is actually consequential, and helps you to grow and make it to the next level as a composer, but maybe it's not all of it. Maybe it's just that one little thing and that's going to stick with you. Don't worry about everything else and just try to detach yourself from it.
Don't be so sensitive about your music. I know part of it is that we get one performance after writing a piece for six months. That's really hard. I've experienced this many times in my life, and it's really hard not to be completely attached and to have your sense of value as a human being and as a composer connected to your music.
But it's not.
These these things are really not the same thing. Your value is not determined by the kind of music that you write. The music that you write is just the music that you write. It's not who you are, it's just something that you do.
So don't take the critiques personally. Just use them as stepping stones to get to the next level. And if they're useful, great. If they're not, don't worry about it. Even if it's from an experienced composer. I've experienced that myself. I've had masterclasses with many famous composers, and some of the feedback I got from them was useful. Some of it was not. My life is basically unchanged by that. Don't worry about it.
So those are the ten things that I wish that I would have known before I became a composer. I hope that this has been valuable for you. If you like this kind of content, then feel free to like and subscribe. Let me know what kinds of things that you wish that you would have known when you started out, and I'll see you in the next blog.
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Happy composing!
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