Composers need to become experts of the instruments they write for, gain a working knowledge of new repertoire and compositional techniques, develop a unique voice, strengthen their grasp of musical proportion, take the utmost care in creating professional-level scores, build a prominent online presence, apply to competitive opportunities, and begin to understand the social aspects of being a composer which leads to productive rehearsals, commissions and performance opportunities. To obtain this almost overwhelming list of attributes, student composers need authoritative guidance, undying support, and fearless encouragement. I am their steady champion.
Pre-composition: A-Motive-A-Minute, Content and Momentum
Dick Wernick taught me how to generate a wide variety of pre-compositional material when beginning a new work. He suggested that I sit for 20 minutes and force myself to notate a new motive for each minute. “In the end you will have 20 motives—many of which might be hokum pokum, but at least you can get a couple of good ideas from the process”, he said. Another assignment involved analyzing the 12-tone row from Berg’s Lyric Suite (and the work itself) and generate a series of motives and sonorities from it to use in my own new piece. This was all meant to be “pre-composition”, and I was not to start the new piece until I felt like I had judiciously created a large enough pool of workable material or felt like I had exhausted the tone row permutations. What came about was the Berg Variations for piano (2005), which are stylistically nothing like Berg (minimalist, modal) and are not meant to be. But thedisciplined process of working out material beforehand in various guises and permutations provided me with a compositional fluency and springboard from which I could more easily write the 30-minute set of variations. This pre-composition tactic, which I still use and pass on to my students, provides content and momentum when confronting a new piece.
Idea and Execution: Helping Composers Realize Their Ideas (Not My Ideas)
I teach composers that the best music, regardless of style, is a combination of inspired idea with consummate execution. It is one thing to conceptualize a great idea for a piece, but it is another thing entirely to take that idea from concept to creation. This is in fact what makes a composer a composer.
Students sometimes need practical steps toward accomplishing the double bar line. When a student comes to me, for example, with an inspired idea to set a text to music, I suggest they begin analyzing the text, circling evocative words, and writing verbal descriptions and motivic ideas in the margins of their poem— “write all over it”, I say. We then decide on a voice part and instrumentation, if not already decided. I would suggest a couple of favorite pieces to study together, as examples (Feldman, Rothko Chapel, Schumann, Hör’ ich das Liedchen klingen, etc.). The student would go to work and come back with (hopefully) an assortment of ideas. The crucial role for the instructor here is to help the student select the best ideas to develop for their piece by giving them solid musical supporting arguments. It’s important to gracefully guide the student toward their best music through logical insight and inspired demonstration—either through singing, sound effects, or at the piano—and to make them believe that the insights they are having are entirely their own and not necessarily the result of instructor input. Musical insight, or a deep connectivity and control of their musical language, is the one gift that will distinguish students as composers with distinctive artistic identities.
Inspiring by Example
I like to share recordings and scores of my own music in composition lessons, seminars, and through live performance. One of my favorite composition professors, Sven-David Sandström, shared his music in his weekly composition seminar at Indiana University. It was inspiring to hear him discuss his compositional process, learn how he developed his ideas, and hear about how his commissions materialized. He loved sharing his work with students and would often close his eyes and convulse to the rhythmic drive of the music as we listened together with the scores. He was one of the only professors that socialized with students after class. This included lots of composer “war stories” that entertained and inspired us, and which broadened his influence into the social sphere (not to mention his famous love of greasy nachos and Glenlivet Scotch).
Sven-David was unique because, as his student, I was directly influenced by his sound and could learn precisely how to mimic his musical gestures because he would show me how to notate a sound and where to apply it. He was open to different musical ideas, however, and supported my individual voice. This is something I truly believe in now that I am in the role of instructor.
Tricks for Avoiding Writer’s Block (or “Corduroy Head”)
Sometimes, the notes simply don’t come easily. Self-criticism can stifle even the simplest of tunes to the point of limited or no production. Fortunately, there are a variety of tricks to help composers realize ideas—tricks passed down to me or discovered over the years—like forcing yourself to write “a-motive-a-minute” (Wernick), online random note generators, and pushing yourself to write a complete piece overnight—a stream-of-consciousness-no-filter compositional mode (I was happily forced into this valuable and revealing type of writing for my two IU Doctoral Documents and The 2017 48-Hour Opera Festival in San Francisco). “Just keep writing stuff without judgement” is the mentality here. It is better to wrangle a bad melody into something more sublime than to despair with nothing at all. Oh, and that despair is something I call “Corduroy Head” because whenever I had periods of low productivity, I would sit with my arm on the piano and my head resting on my jacket sleeve made of Corduroy trying to pluck out something spectacular. After sitting like this for a while and coming up with nothing, I would take a break and see that my forehead had Corduroy lines on it. Luckily, I haven’t had this problem lately because of some of these tactics above.
Don Freund, my composition professor at IU, dissertation advisor, and composition pedagogy mentor, teaches most of the freshman composers at IU. He teaches them a set of valuable insights and skills in the form of weekly composition exercises that challenge students and reveal how well they can compose with limited means. For example, he assigns the “Half-Step Etude”, a fast monophonic piece using only 16th notes, half steps, no repeated notes, and a fixed length of 12 bars in common time. Having done this myself, it is quite staggering how much you will depend on dynamics and tessitura within these prescribed boundaries. It really pushes you to focus on and refine specific aspects of composition that may otherwise go unnoticed. If you can make a good piece out of only half-steps, imagine what you can do with complete freedom.
One of my favorite methods from Freund, and one that I still use regularly, is what he called “canvas composition”, where you aim to compose large sections of music without getting lost in detail—creating a long-range, large platform of material not unlike the background landscape on a painter’s canvas. You are left with at least a solid foundation, and once you revisit the “landscape” of notes, you can edit them, accordingly, add foreground material, and refine your piece. In other words, having a double bar line on a piece of only first-draft-quality can fuel you to complete something more refined upon revision.
Teaching Beyond Craft
Beyond essential lessons on craft, composers must be taught how to build and maintain relationships with musicians who will perform their music. They must learn how to tactfully conduct a constructive and efficient rehearsal of their music. Much of this is learned through rehearsals and performances of their music during student composition recitals. I encourage them to apply to various opportunities like the Minnesota Orchestra Composers Institute and the Mizzou New Music Summer Festival (with Alarm Will Sound), and other composer training environments to further develop these important skills.
Teaching composition involves more than supporting creative concepts. I help my undergraduate students create a clear and professionally engraved score and parts, and even help them come up with titles. I incorporate practical things like score binding, paper types, and appropriate score size. I help create cover pages, program notes, and personally spiral bind their final scores at the end of the semester. I encourage students to self-publish and not be dependent on expensive and cumbersome copying services. Much of this, learned in training and in the field—through experiences as the 2012 Subito Music Composer Fellow and as music engraver for Subito—is passed down to my students.
Additionally, strongly encourage a prominent online presence and require students to create SoundCloud and Issuu accounts (for score uploads). I guide upperclassmen and graduate students in the creation of their personal websites. All my composition students become members of ASCAP, so that they can register their work and eventually receive royalties for performances. Furthermore, I recommend services like Scorefolio, which is an effective tool to help publish scrolling score videos onto YouTube.
Know Your Composers
Composers must know musical works written in the distant and not-too-distant past, as well as the creative works of today. It is inspiring to hear the recent Pulitzer or Grawemeyer winner and their musical techniques and/or concepts so that a standard of excellence can be set. However, I also encourage the discovery of composers who are not winning major composition awards, because awards do not measure every greatness. Knowing these works can, at best, help to steer and crystalize a composer’s aesthetic direction and fuel them to create. After all, it is difficult to write something unique in concert halls full of so many great ideas, but it is even harder to be truly original without first knowing what has already been done. I would rather my students stand knowledgeable yet humble on the marble shoulders of Beethoven than act with conceit shrouded in blind ignorance.
Keep Composing
Developing a unique composer voice takes a very long time. And the only way to truly become proficient at something is to be persistent and continually note and rectify your mistakes and build from experience over time. I encourage my students to fulfill the insatiable need to write music, to always strive for a next, better piece, and commit to completing projects to the best of their ability. I’ll close with a simple, pithy expression that I say to my students, via Jennifer Higdon: “keep composing!”
MUSIC THEORY & MUSICIANSHIP Inspiring Students to Become the Musical Icons we Study in Class As an educator, my primary goal is to connect students with the content I teach. One of the best ways to drawl students into a new concept is to feature the work of their icons in class, then demonstrate music’s universality by finding that same concept in the works of other composers throughout history. In this way, class concepts are not linked to race, gender, nationality, or anything else, but are universal and a vital part of all music. Featuring student heroes empowers them. It provides students with a safe, inclusive, and supportive environment to thrive and learn, while maintaining and nurturing their identity.
This is especially important at an institution like SJSU, with its diverse student body. These students may feel disconnected with the traditional music curriculum drawn from the Western Canon, where minority musical icons have been marginalized. I have been hired as a Faculty Special Consultant in the School of Music and Dance at San José State University to revitalize and update the theory curriculum, identify instances of systemic racism, and ameliorate its marginalization of minority figures. It has been a welcome challenge: I have learned much by discussing ideas with other faculty, contacting former theory professors for advice, reading articles on curriculum design, and creating student polls to see how we can revise the curriculum to be more inclusive, stimulating, and relevant.
One example of this new direction was in my ear training classes. At the start of the semester, students seemed a little more despondent than usual. They didn’t have their cameras on in Zoom and did not take so kindly to the request to turn them on. One student mentioned how she missed singing together as a class. I, too, wanted us to sing together in unison with piano harmonizations, or in canons as we did during in-person classes. But current online technology, with all of its latencies, can’t fluently stream a class of 30 students singing together with a piano accompaniment. Something had to change.
To make the course’s content more engaging, I designed projects to help students connect with each other. I had the students sing in Duet Relays, where they exchanged phrases of Classical melodies in Zoom Breakout room pairs. This was a good start, but it just wasn’t enough. It felt forced, and the students were unmotivated enough as it were. Since sharing common experiences is one of the most immediate ways to connect with people, I assigned students to apply solfege to their favorite pop songs by marginalized artists and to sing these songs in class. Pop Song Solfege was a hit! They connected with each other by sharing their favorite music (with comments like: “oh, this is the best song!”). It reinforced our class concepts by giving them a practical application outside of our meetings. It challenged students to think analytically about the songs they know so well. And students inevitably mentioned where they would begin singing in the song, which forced them to understand and describe the structure of the music. Rarely has there been so much active participation in my prepared singing classes and I enjoyed getting to know the Pop artists who are a big part of the music of this generation. I learned that if a student’s icon is “legitimized” by being featured in class, then they too are legitimized. This promotes student confidence and overall performance in class. With assignments like this, I hope and anticipate to turn my ear-training courses from classes that students need to take into classes that students want to take.
Another example can be found in my theory classes, where students were assigned collaborative chorale composition projects setting text inspired by the BLM movement, LGBTQ rights, and/or COVID culture. They are competing to showcase their work in the Pandemic Pandemonium Promenade, a college-wide presentation of various student creations inspired by our times in a variety of media. Yet students were having trouble knowing how to start such an imposing project. So, I created an in-class composition exercise that would set Langston Hughes’ Dream Deferred to music. We started brainstorming ideas about the text. Students felt “like a raisin in the sun” could be set with a bright Major 7th Chord, and “run” could be a sequence or modulation to a remote key, for example. Many captivating ideas were shared as students were engaged and motivated. After this pre-compositional text study, we looked at the music that I composed beforehand. Many students seemed stunned by how I approached the text. Instead of a standard linear text setting, the poetry looped back on itself or was mixed up, there were antiphonal solo lines, and the chords were approached more contrapuntally than blocked. This was quite different than many of the prosaic in-class chorale exercises we had composed together. The purpose of this exercise was to teach students how to practically approach a new project and to show them how to do it in a creative way that goes beyond the standard music theory classroom methods. This is one of the things I am most excited about in my teaching: My theory students become composers. I provide them with insight into how music can be put together from a composer’s perspective: balancing several musical elements into a sculpture of sound, where context, contrast, and variety govern over “rules”, models, and roman numerals. At the end of class, students had a much better awareness of just how creative they could be. And this college-wide project takes their music from simple classwork into the realm of relevant, socially minded artistic statements.
NASM Lecture on Teaching "Differently Prepared" Students (with resources list):
PIANO How to Play like a Composer with a “Deep Personal Connection with Each Note”
To me, important elements of a well-rounded keyboard studies program should include teaching improvisation, transcription, music theory, hand-written notation, and other musicianship practices that go beyond the standard piano curriculum to develop the “musician” in every pianist.
A concert review of my Third Piano Sonata performance claimed that I played with a “deep personal connection with each note...” ‘Well, of course!’ I would say. Since I wrote every note, it makes perfect sense that my performance would intimately match the intent behind every note. Piano performance and composition—they are one and the same for me. Yet this leads me to one of the foundations behind my playing, and that is to teach pianists to play like composers, the real manipulators behind the notes—to “become the music” and express artistry, vulnerability, and flexibility along the way. The following are some methods I have found to be helpful in teaching students to play like a composer. I encourage all my piano students to explore the art of improvisation. After several improvisation sessions, students often invigorate standard repertoire with a new spontaneity, electricity, and acumen. This is not to mention the practical skill that improvisation teaches you, of being able to fake your way out of a memory slip. My students are assigned to improvise on any given section of their prepared music, then find their way back so that they build confidence, security, and have a little imposed fun along the way. Of course, when it comes to performance time, we play what’s on the page with respect to the composer. Yet it is crucial to have a Plan B when needed in performance, because that need is more of a reality than anyone expects. My piano students create transcriptions, lead sheet realizations, and figured bass realizations. Horowitz’s fleet-footed Carmen Variations or octave-pounding Stars and Stripes Forever come to mind. Would Horowitz have been Horowitz without his transcriptions? These projects introduce students to the struggle and triumph of creativity, and their playing becomes more organic and in touch with the material. There is no way a pianist would play without a "deep personal connect with each note" if they laboriously crafted each note on the page. To galvanize memory and/or refresh interest, I encourage my students to hand-copy the scores they are learning, revealing overlooked details and a more intimate knowledge of the score. As a final polish, I suggest that students write out the score from memory. And just like little Johann Sebastian, who broke into his brother’s music chest to peek at the new, exciting scores, and copy them out, students are immediately beguiled by the score details that emerge and a deeper level of interest reveals itself. One of my students has been having issues with creating his own unique interpretation and artistry at the piano. He often plays the music metronomically and dry. I’ve been encouraging him to add rubato here and there by assigning him to point out three “favorite moments” in the score. I said, “in terms of your favorite places, give me the ‘what, where, why, and how’ in your piece and we will take it from there”. For example, in his Beethoven, Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111, movement II, I asked him to find his favorite spot, tell me why it was his favorite (with a fair amount of theory), then address how he will play it to convince the listener that it is his favorite spot. We added agogic accents and ritenente and were able to start playing with more expression. We applied this strategy to the rest of the score. His Beethoven was never the same. Another pianist I teach played like a “good student” without a unique personality at the keyboard. She looked robotic—perhaps afraid to make facial expressions in the lesson or move in a way that demonstrates a real dramatic stage presence. This is an important aspect of artistry, so I demonstrated my own way to perform excerpts of her Scriabin, Tenth Sonata. Then I asked her to tell me how she thinks Scriabin would play it: “how would he look when playing it? Do you think he would remain still the whole time? Who was Scriabin anyway? And how could you play more like him so that your performance is more in line with his style?” These questions got her thinking. But the real magic happened when I asked her to watch a video of Keith Jarrett performing. He is a hero of mine and a remarkable improviser, Classical and Jazz pianist (although, unfortunately, he is no longer playing due to a stroke). I asked her to just try to imitate his mannerisms while playing a short excerpt of her piece. In the next lesson, she played like him, laughed about it in embarrassment, but is now aware of how her body moves, how her facial expression shapes her interpretation, and is much more open to movement, and her playing sounds just a little bit freer and more flexible because of it. As a long-term music theory instructor, I always say that theory informs performance. A thorough theoretical analysis revealing a true narrative of the score can help craft a pianist’s unique interpretation. In lessons, I spend a fair amount of time reflecting on things like a composer’s balanced thematic narrative, the use of piano texture to match or not match dynamics, a uniquely deceptive chord progression, or whatever makes the music valuable. Value translates to love; love translates to playing like a composer; playing like a composer translates to confidence and freedom in performance, which in turn makes for a memorable, or even everlasting, musical experience for all. Finally, having said all of this, I would like to be clear: all my students learn their scales, cadences, arpeggios and all necessary standard technique for playing Classical piano music, and most other styles. I just approach it from a more creative angle, to have “musical fun” with the material, often drawling technical exercises or “studies” directly from a musical problem presented in score. For example, one of my students recently had an issue coordinating the cadence of a Mozart Sonata, which included an Alberti bass and cadential trill preceded by a scale. I suggested that she first learn the scale pattern associate with the excerpt (B-flat major, hands together, 4 octaves, in increasing rhythmic subdivisions, in this case). Then, block the left hand Alberti pattern while playing the right hand as written. This seemed to help quite a bit. But we then added an additional trill study for added right hand security (sequencing/transposing whole-step trills down the keyboard through the given scale) as well as what I call “isolated excerpts”, where we take one or two difficult measures and practice them alone several times at slow, moderate, and fast tempos. These excerpts are then cycled into a “from-the-top, run-through” performance. If there is still an issue, I suggest for students to repeat the above processes.