More from the Soul of Music

Zen and the Art of Music Composition

Composition doesn’t have to be complex or hard work to yield good music. Anyone can practice it with the acquiring of a few principles and a trust for the process of right-brain thinking. The following represents an easy approach to composition, which anyone can learn quickly, and practice to the point of infinity.

I. Listen carefully to what you hear in your mind’s ear or in physical reality.
II. Capture some sound (in a verbal description, sound recording (sampling) or some form of musical notation).
III. Process the sound in some perceptible sense by varying some aspect(s) of the sound
IV. Document the process in some form.
V. Go back to step one
VI. Evaluate the results and revise if necessary (Be careful of self criticism; if it becomes too obsessive, put revision off until later. Don’t dam up the creative flow.)
VII. At some point, break this cycle and present the resultant sounds. A good rule of thumb is Dylan Thomas’ idea to stop when the revisions don’t make the poem any better.

Everything we do as composers can be seen as some part of this approach.

Composition and the spirit of work

As a child I had a recurring dream about being in a desert or beach with high dunes around me on all sides. Sitting alone in the sand with the hot sun overhead and a small sieve in hand, my job was to strain all the sand of the dunes through the sieve. When beginning to study composition in my early twenties, I remembered the dream and understood that every grain of sand I was straining represented one of the musical notes I was to compose in my life. Each note coming out of the end of my pencil was arriving from an infinite source and was being filtered through my mind, symbolized by the sieve. Having taken this experience as a metaphor for my compositional work, I continue to work in a disciplined manner, like a scientist or a kitchen worker separating spices by hand.