ADVICE FOR YOUNG COMPOSERS

I find myself giving the same advice to different students each semester at Concordia, where I teach applied composition. Some of these tips echo a great article I read recently by Adam Benjamin. His target audience is jazz writers, but it's a good read for any composer, regardless of genre. 

Another excellent resource is the Portfolio Composer Podcast, where my friend Garrett interviews professional composers about their careers. Tell him I sent you!

Here are some things I tell my applied composition students:

• WRITE AS MUCH MUSIC AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN. It won't all be great, that's okay. Just write it. Think of the pieces you compose the way a baseball player approaches at-bats. Sometimes you get a hit, sometimes you strike out, once in a while you'll hit a home run. The important thing is to get up and take your swings every day.

• DON'T REVISE A FINISHED PIECE OVER AND OVER. Get to the final barline, clean it up, and get it performed. Maybe revise once. Then onto the next one. The way you get better is by making the next piece better.

• WRITE MUSIC FOR YOUR FRIENDS. Find someone you know who plays or sings really well and compose something specifically for them. Show them drafts in progress and get their feedback about what works and what doesn’t. The relationships you build now can have big payoffs down the road.

• RECORD EVERYTHING. Get a portable recorder if you don’t have one already. You’ll learn more in one minute of hearing your music played by humans than you will in hours of composition lessons. Anytime someone performs your music, record it. Record rehearsals too.

• PLAY PIANO AND SING. Knowing other instruments is great, but these two are the most important. Every instrument is at least a little bit like the human voice, and if you plan to write more than one note at a time, you’ll be glad you can find your way around the keyboard.

• DEVELOP YOUR EAR. If you didn’t ace your ear training classes, get back to work. If you have strong ears already, transcribe super hard stuff until you get even better. Composers should always have the best ears in the room. If you can’t identify intervals and chords when you hear them, how can we trust that you mean the notes you’re putting down?

• "IF IT SOUNDS GOOD, IT IS GOOD." Don't ignore this obvious advice from Duke Ellington. Write music that sounds good.

• WRITE BY HAND, OR DON'T. There's no right or wrong answer here. Staff paper, computer, whatever. Just write. Of course you’ll need notation software eventually to finish the piece, but for the initial composing stages, do what works for you. I know some composers who write entire pieces by hand, and then engrave all at once. My personal preference is to compose little sections at the piano, then get them right into the computer, editing on the fly.

• WRITE A "BAD ENDING." If you’re having trouble sticking the landing, write a placeholder ending that is purposefully bad. Get to the final barline. Wait a day, then rework the bad ending into something better.

• WRITER'S BLOCK? Rearrange the furniture in your composing space. Seriously. Put your desk on the other side of the room. Then try again.

• WRITER'S BLOCK? Get outside. Run around, mow the lawn, walk the dog. Then try again.

• WRITER'S BLOCK? Power through. Get something down, even if you hate it. You might like it tomorrow. Even if you don’t, you’ve changed your problem from “I’ve got nothing” to “I need to improve this.” It’s a more manageable situation.

• LISTEN TO EVERYTHING. Soak up all the music you can. Find good stuff in different styles and genres, and wear it out. The music that seeps into you over time, by osmosis, becomes your vocabulary. It’s the most important thing that informs your own writing.

  If you know any young (or not-so-young) composers, or composition teachers, feel free to share this with them! I’d love to hear from anyone who has other good tips.

4 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR EAR

I teach freshman music theory and ear training at UNL, and my students are always asking how they can practice for dictation exams and get better at sight-singing. Here’s what I tell them:

1. LEARN TO HEAR AND RECOGNIZE INTERVALS, FAST

I can’t stress the “fast” part of this enough. As a real-life musician, your ability to identify intervals is only useful when you know immediately which one you are hearing. Practice this by making “audio flashcards.” Using your computer or phone, record yourself playing intervals on the piano or another instrument. Record an interval, wait about 2 seconds, then say the name of the interval. Make as many of these as you possibly can, using all the intervals, starting on different notes and mixing up melodic/harmonic and ascending/descending. Create a separate track for each interval (together with its answer), and dump them all into a shuffled playlist. Boom. Instant interval practice you can do anywhere.

Pssssst: Using familiar songs to recognize intervals is okay (a la Perfect 4th = Here Comes the Bride), but it’s better if you just memorize them cold. It’s like when you learned multiplication tables in 3rd grade. Yeah, you can count out 3 groups of 3 and get to 9, but algebra is going to be a nightmare if that’s how you’re doing it every time.

Pssssst #2: There are, of course, many online resources/software/apps that will play intervals at you for practice. But creating the audio flashcards yourself adds a layer of participation to the process that I think is beneficial. It’s like writing out your own study notes for a test instead of using notes that someone else took.

2. PLAY A FOUR-PART HYMN AT THE PIANO EVERY DAY

Pick a hymn and play it four times, singing along with each voice part once. If you haven't done this before, or if your piano skills need work, it will be hard at first. But it gets easier the more you do it, and it's about the best way I can think to develop your ear. If you don't own a hymnal, get one. I recommend Lutheran Service Book, but other good ones are really cheap if you buy them used.

For a more advanced version of this, use Bach chorales. They're more harmonically challenging, and there's more motion to navigate in the voice parts. You can download them all for free here.

3. TRANSCRIBE CHORD PROGRESSIONS FROM POP SONGS

Print off lyrics with space above each line to write the chords in. Then sit at the piano and work it out. You can listen to the song (probably with a lot of starting and stopping), or just try to remember how it goes. Sing the melody and find the lowest notes of each chord first. Beatles songs are great for this.

4. SING FAMILIAR MELODIES TO YOURSELF IN SOLFEGE

You can do this anytime, anywhere - no need for a piano or headphones or anything else. Sing a song you know, using solfège syllables. Don’t prepare anything or write it out beforehand - sing it slowly and figure out the syllables as you go. You’ll know how the song goes, so you should be able to sing the pitches correctly. But singing in solfège forces you to think about the intervals and where each note is compared to tonic. You can also do this by singing scale degree numbers or note names (pick any key, it doesn’t have to be the key you’re actually in).

What's this one? DO, re MI, do MI, do, MI. RE, mi FA fa mi re FAAAAAA.

Hopefully some of these ideas are helpful for you! Happy Ear Training...

Recent Projects

Welcome to the blog! I’ll be posting here with updates on my composition work, performances, and other music-related thoughts. You can click here to subscribe to email updates anytime a new blog post is added.

Here’s What I Did This Summer.

Among other things, it was a productive stretch of composing new choral music. These six pieces were written between May and July, and they will all have premieres before January 2017:

COME BACK FROM THE ECHOLESS SHORE for SATB and piano. Text by Elizabeth Akers Allen, commissioned by Brett Epperson and the Lincoln East Singers. Brett is an outstanding young conductor, and he is building a monster choral program at East High here in Lincoln. I’m so excited to work with them on this piece and accompany the premiere, which will be in November at the Nebraska Music Educators Association Conference.

HOLD FAST TO DREAMS for 3-part male chorus and piano. Text by Langston Hughes, commissioned by Sean Vogt and The Apollo Club of Minneapolis. I met Sean through our mutual friends Matt Oltman and Sean Burton. Sean asked me to compose an energetic, uplifting closer for the annual Northstar Choral Festival in the Twin Cities. The piece will premiere there in January, performed by a 300-voice choir of collegiate and high school men attending the festival.

MAKE A JOYFUL NOISE for SATB, piano and C instrument. Text from Psalm 100, commissioned by Jonathan Vevia and the adult choir at Trinity Lutheran Church in Bend, OR. Jon’s choir commissioned me to write a piece in honor of their Director of Church Music for her 40 years of music ministry. I won’t say her name here because the commission is a secret gift for her and the premiere performance in September will be a surprise!

A LAMB GOES UNCOMPLAINING FORTH: A Lenten Cantata for SATB, tenor soloist, string ensemble and organ. This is a seven-movement sacred work inspired by the traditional Bach Cantata model. I used English translations of the Gerhardt hymn, and text from Genesis 22 and Isaiah 53. This will be premiered by the Lincoln Lutheran Choir in November alongside new sacred music by my friends Kurt Knecht and Garrett Hope. I’ll post more about this exciting concert as it gets closer.

LIFT UP YOUR HEARTS for SATB unaccompanied, written for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln University Singers, conducted by Peter Eklund. I’ve been lucky to have Pete program some of my pieces for UNL’s excellent flagship choral ensemble, but it’s usually been loud and fast music. I told him I wanted to send him a piece that was quiet and lush and beautiful for them to sing this fall, and he said to go for it. This one will also be premiered at the NMEA conference in November.

FLOOD THE GOLD EARTH for SATB and piano, written for the Concordia University A Cappella Choir, conducted by Kurt von Kampen. I’ve written quite a few pieces for my Dad’s choir in the last 10 years, but this one might be my favorite. This has a super difficult piano accompaniment, which I’ll get to tackle at the premiere in November (also at NMEA).

That’s it for this one. First blog post in the books. Thanks for reading!

David