Stray thoughts on composition

a medley

Composition is an art of turning one’s auditory hallucinations into symbols interpretable by other people.

Robert Schumann: “In order to compose, all you need to do is remember a tune no one has thought of.”

When writing music, I feel like Alice peeking through the tiny door into the wondrous garden, and only catching glimpses of it, which I hasten to write down lest they escape me. There’s so much more to it, but I’m only capturing the most obvious bits. I don’t know how to access the rest — only have a feeling of it as something enormous and insanely beautiful. There’s a gap between the Big Something and that which I can glimpse from it, and then a gap between what I can glimpse and what I can actually write down. The second gap is arguably easier to close.

A bit of a counterpoint: There’s a certain inevitability with which some ideas resurface in my mind, as if making sure that I will write them down no matter what.

All things considered, in composition it is better to work on a microlevel and generate sketches and seeds of ideas rather than focus on high abstractions of the macrolevel (describing the overall structure of a piece). Seeds of ideas can later sprout into coherent structures and come together in surprising ways, while staying at a macrolevel can be arresting and a sign of avoidance of actual work. Thinking in abstractions is always easier than working on the concrete. It’s important to imagine a piece as a whole in advance but more often than not, it coalesces out of bits and pieces in ways that are hard to predict in advance.

Some of the music I’ve written so far is my homage to beloved pieces by other composers. If it’s a fugue, the quote is in the subject, or else it can be alluded to in less obvious ways. The seed of an idea for a composition is often in another piece. For example, the first movement of my suite for cello and piano opens with a lulling chord pattern that was inspired by the fifth movement (Nunc dimittis) of Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil, even though the harmonies are completely different. The piano accompaniment in the opening of the third movement of the cello suite was inspired by Gara Garayev’s Prelude no. 5 from 24 Preludes.

When actively composing, I listen to very little music by other composers. The things I do listen to are necessary for the entrainment of patterns that I am trying to generate. For example, listening to mugham recordings when I write a mugham fugue.

I am a device for turning lemon ginger tea into music scores. I/O: 1 cup of tea = 2-10 measures.

Wrote this down in summer 2021: in years of doing science I haven’t experienced as much happiness as in half a year of writing music.

I wouldn’t have been able to get started in composition if not for the encouragement and guidance of my teacher. It is incredibly heartening to be able to work with someone who witnesses the evolution of each piece from its first to last measures.

Once you’ve written a piece, it’s not yours anymore.