“What to Listen for in Music” by Aaron Copland
Today on the book list, we’re going over What to Listen for in Music by the famous 20th century American classical composer Aaron Copland.
A large portion of this book covers how to listen to music as a consumer more intentionally, as a composer would.
One of the most practical and relevant chapters is Ch. 3, which deals with the musical creative writing process:
In this short chapter, Copland focuses on answering just a few relevant and common questions concerned with how the writing of music works:
Where does inspiration come from?
Do you write your music at the piano?
How do you begin writing a piece of music-where do you start?
Where does inspiration come from?
Copland does a lot of debunking here. Most people who aren’t musicians consider inspiration to be like lighting striking, and all that composers do is wait for that lighting to strike and capture it. Certainly a romantic idea!
The real-world reality, though, is that writing music is an act and a habit more than it is collecting lighting in a bottle.
Copland says it best in his responses to this question:
“The composer…does not say to himself: “do I feel inspired?” He says to himself: “Do I feel like composing today?” And if he feels like composing, he does…it’s as simple as that.”
“…after you have finished composing, you hope that everyone, including yourself, will recognize the thing you have been writing as having been inspired. But that is really an idea tacked on at the end.”
“The professional composer can sit down day after day and turn out some kind of music. On some days it will undoubtably be better than others, but the primary fact is the ability to compose. Inspiration is often only a by-product.”
Do you write your music at the piano?
This response is a bit dated. When the book was written there was seemingly some odd debate going on questioning if writing music while using an instrument as a writing tool was “cheating” or not, compared to only writing your ideas out in pure music notation straight from your head directly onto the page.
Copland cuts through this quite succinctly, and I agree with his answer, which I’ll summarize:
As long as the results of the writing process are working for the individual composer, the tools used to write don’t matter.
How do you start writing?
This is one of my favorite portions of this chapter. Copland answers this question by talking about process. He breaks the music writing process into three steps:
the loose collection of short themes.
developing a complete song from the most promising of those themes.
deciding the medium on which that song is to be performed.
This gets to the heart of a common issue with songwriters: expecting to write a complete song all at once in one long go, and then getting frustrated when that doesn’t happen easily.
Of course it doesn’t! That’s not how writing anything works.
Writing is always a gradual development process that flows from the collection of smaller ideas. Putting ideas together that were sometimes written months or years apart, in ways you might not have thought of when you first wrote them, is to be expected.
If you’re waiting on a complete song to just fly out fully formed with no editing necessary, you’re going to be waiting a long time for that. And, while you’re sitting around waiting for that to happen, you’re probably not doing a high enough volume of writing to ever get really good at doing it.
In short, writing is a regular and consistent act of gradual development over time. And, it requires a willingness to fail repeatably while developing those ideas.
I really like this process breakdown. It takes the pressure off to come up with that “perfect” song that doesn’t exist. And, it accepts and formalizes the reality of how writing music actually works in the real world, rather than playing into any overly romantic societal notions about what being an artist looks like.
Considering instrumentation after composition
I also like how Copland doesn’t consider the instrumentation (in his terms, the “sound medium”) of how his music is to be performed until after the actual composition is done. This is the opposite of what many popular musicians do, where their music is written intending to be performed on the same instruments that it was written on.
It’s an interesting take on the process, and allows for a lot of flexibility. When you separate the instruments being used from the musical ideas themselves, you gain the ability to do many different arrangements of the same music.
This can let you generate a lot of different music from a rather small amount of compositional source material. This is a common technique in the classical music composition world, but not seen as much in the popular music side, and is an idea well worth exploring if you’ve never tried it.
If your musical ideas are strong enough to stand on their own, independent of the instruments themselves, they’re probably ready for prime time.
