In collegiate music programs, there are so many lessons, concerts, rehearsals, juries, and other schedule obligations that while a week can feel endless, the years can go by all too quickly, turning into a blur of activities going faster than any of us realize. I know this all too well, as I graduated with a B.M. in Composition from the University of Louisville in 2023, and I’m one semester away from graduating with an M.M. in Choral Conducting from Louisville. I’ve been in music school since August 2019, and there are several hard-earned lessons I wish I had understood and acted on from day one. Experience is a teacher like no other, and before I graduate next semester, here are five parting gifts of advice for student choral composers I wish I had known.
1. Challenge Your Aesthetic
Musical acculturation is a fickle thing. We all harbor the spark that led us into the art form, and we all have those initial composers who we admire and enjoy studying. For me, those initial composers were titans of the art form like Whitacre, Lauridsen, Forrest, Hagenberg, and others whose music I encountered singing in high school choirs. However, in the early days and years of my degree, I wish I had experimented more. As students, we have this gift of academic security that allows us to explore our art form freely. That freedom gives us the option ability to nestle into a resonating chamber of music, we’re comfortable with, but that nestling is a waste of the freedom granted to us. You may worry about writing something you don’t “like” or that you don’t think “sounds good,” but how can we possibly expect to grow without boldly challenging ourselves to seek discomfort? Read new music websites, seek out new composers, study scores of things you might not enjoy as a listener, and you may be surprised by how much more music you can appreciate and learn from than you realize.
In the composition world, I often hear the idea that we owe it to the art form to innovate, experiment, and see how we can drive our genres forward. While I agree with this sentiment, I think the exercise of wondering how we can grow the art form is overly simplistic. Much more importantly, we owe it to ourselves to boldly seek new ideas, styles, and challenges to our current aesthetic. From day one of your freshman year, seek to encounter new music and write things that you may not feel as naturally predisposed to. Staying in your stylistic comfort zone will deny you the chance to fully grow your compositional horizons. While the rest of the music world may repeatedly remark on how young we are, I think we too often forget just how young we are and fail to grant ourselves grace. This is a time to experiment, make mistakes, and explore in ways that we might not have the artistic or financial convenience of doing later in our lives.
2. Cultivate Relationships
As younger students, it is too easy to become daunted by the level of talent and expectations around us in a music school. Everyone is immensely busy all the time, and approaching other colleagues and professors about performing our music can frankly be scary. Despite that, I think we too often forget that our art form is a social one. We need others to fully realize our goals, and in an academic environment, our peers are more willing to perform our music than we may initially think. In addition to befriending people and sharing your music with professors, offering your services as a performer for others goes a long way as well. I’ve sung in all of the choirs that have premiered my works at UofL, and during my undergraduate degree, I regularly performed as a singer and pianist for other composition student’s works. If we want our music to be performed by our colleagues, the least we can do is be just as willing to perform theirs. Beyond our university environments, form a habit of making other connections online and at conferences. If you find a performance you like, contact the conductor and introduce yourself! Conferences hosted by organizations like ACDA and NAfME are fantastic opportunities to hear other groups perform and meet conductors in person. When I began seriously composing, I had the false assumption that if my music was good enough, people would seek me out for performance. Often, merely introducing yourself to someone and sharing your music can pay dividends.
The freshman year of my undergraduate degree began in the Fall of 2019, which means that except for my first semester and my senior year, performances, classes, and trips at my university were drastically impacted by the pandemic. This was extremely isolating at first, but at UofL and other schools across the country, we found ways to keep making music despite the added challenges. I had no expectation of music being performed during the early months of the pandemic, but I shared some of my pieces with our choir director anyway. To my surprise, in Fall 2020 as we were beginning socially-distanced rehearsals in a parking garage on campus, he asked to perform one of them! My piece A Winter Night premiered on a brisk November afternoon in the heart of the pandemic, and even though I’ve had far better recordings and better performance venues since then (I’ll never take concert halls for granted again), I can’t listen to the original outdoor recording of the piece without crying. Your professors want to see you succeed, and they will be more willing than you realize to encourage you and help you however they can. In an era of rapidly evolving MIDI technologies and the introduction of AI into renderings of our scores, it can be more convenient and much easier to generate a high-quality rendering and move on. In spite of this, settling for nothing but a digital rendering removes the human element from our uniquely human art form and denies us the chance to cultivate relationships through our music and form meaningful connections.
3. Find Texts that Move You
The single biggest differentiator between choral/vocal composition and other forms of composition is the usage of language. From Gregorian Chant to adaptations of contemporary literature, our art form is largely defined by the writing around us. As another point of emotional connection, the texts we choose to set are an integral part of our music, and to become a fully engaged student of composition, we must also become fully engaged students of literature. As you cultivate your musical ideas, cultivate your options for texts as well. I try to avoid reading poetry for the sole sake of selecting a text for a piece. I read poetry for the love of reading poetry, and when I’m ready to write a piece that I need a text for, I know what works I can turn to for inspiration.
Copyright laws complicate setting famous recent poems (Mary Oliver’s estate is famously restrictive of any musical settings of her work, much to my dismay), so for young composers, poetry in the public domain and collaborating with living poets (possibly in your community) represent wonderful, more affordable opportunities to find great texts to set. In addition to reading actively, it is vital that we properly understand how to analyze what we’re reading. There are several great resources for learning to read analytically (one of my favorites is How to Read Literature Like a Professor) and through careful study of both the text and the author’s life, we can glean so much more information to consider in our setting than if we simply just pick a poem that we think sounds nice.
With all of this in mind, it’s important to emphasize that you’re far better off setting text that resonates with you. Through the years I’ve found that setting something I thoroughly believe in or am moved by is a far better writing experience than setting something because it’s famous or popular. For lesser-known public domain poets you find, if you believe in their work enough, your music can also transform into a level of activism for promoting that poet’s writing. I often hear conductors say that their job is to serve the wishes of the composer, and when I write choral or vocal music, I strive to serve and respect the intentions of the poet at all costs. However, we must offer more to audiences than straightforward recitations in our settings. Once in a masterclass, a clinician remarked that the piece I showed him was incredibly well done, but he was troubled that he couldn’t hear what I believed about the text in the piece. Setting a text is a wonderful intellectual collaboration between author and composer, and if we didn’t have something unique to say through our music about the text, there would be no reason to write the piece. It is imperative that you learn how to analyze what you’re reading, but above all, find a text you believe in and run with it.
4. Write More
During the collegiate experience, our life is centered around deadlines. We have lessons to prepare for, rehearsals to get to, and finals to complete, and our writing is often done with stress and time crunches as the biggest motivator. Amid everything else happening, it can be easy to relegate your actual composing to the back burner for your other studies. However, the only way to keep growing as a composer is to keep writing. In the words of the author William Faulkner, “Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything good.” When I first started composing, I composed very sporadically, devoting long stretches to writing things when inspiration happened to strike me. While my schedule no longer allows for those types of long writing stretches (when I graduate I want nothing more than to disappear into the wilderness for a week and write), I’ve also learned that inspiration is overrated. Put another way, inspiration happens when we need it to. Get yourself in a strictly scheduled habit of writing instead of filling in the gaps in your schedule with writing when you can. You’ll find that inspiration strikes at 6:00 AM, 12:00 PM, or 8:00 PM, and can be manifested precisely when you need it to be if you develop the discipline to keep writing, whether you think the result is something you’re completely satisfied with or not. People often ask me what my favorite piece I’ve composed
is, and I despise that question because picking a favorite piece feels akin to picking a favorite child. Over the years, my answer has become simple: “The next one.” We have to keep writing to keep growing, and if there’s something you think you could’ve done better, the great news is that you can do better in your next piece! By continuing to write regularly, we allow ourselves to improve and stave off the demons of anxiety and self-doubt that can pervade when we go for longer stretches without writing something.
5. Remember What This Means
If you’re invested enough in composing, then I don’t have to tell you what this art form should mean to us. The gift of writing music is soul-nourishing, and at some point in our lives, we all felt that same spark of passion that called us by name and led us to this point. However, we must avoid delegitimizing our stresses and struggles in the name of that passion! We are no less a musician when we’re stressed about finishing a piece on time or anxious about our abilities as a composer. These are human struggles, and I would argue that a composer who is supremely self assured in their abilities has shed their vulnerability somewhere along the path for the sake of their ego. People in other careers have remarked to me something to the effect of “You’re so lucky; you must not feel like you’ll have to work a day in your life!” They mean well, but as composers, this mindset is toxic. Telling ourselves lies like if we loved this enough we wouldn’t feel as stressed or unmotivated leads to cycles of self-loathing and deterioration that we must avoid. The mental health struggles we encounter are not confined to our profession, nor are they signs that we’re not trying hard enough or not living up to our potential. In addition to understanding how much the work we do means to us, consider the following story as evidence of how much the work we do means to the rest of the world.
In October 2022, the University of Louisville Cardinal Singers traveled to Magdeburg, Germany for a choral festival and competition. Choirs from the world over attended, and a highlight of the event was performing in “friendship concerts” with choirs from Magdeburg. We did a joint concert with the Magdeburg Knabenchor (Boys’ Choir) in a lovely church with excellent choral acoustics. Our half of the concert featured a wide range of composers from Mendelssohn to Caroline Shaw, and we also got to sing two works with the Knabenchor, including a canon composed by one of their former members. When the concert concluded, I remember thinking it was one of the best concerts I’d ever been a part of, but I had no idea what awaited me just a few moments later. Immediately we started walking down from the altar space, a middle-aged woman with a toddler at her side approached my significant other in the choir. In limited but carefully chosen English, she said “I came here from Ukraine six months ago. I had no hope, but you gave me hope.” Friends, my final parting gift is this: never underestimate the impact your art has on the world around you, especially in ways you don’t realize. As long as there are humans, there will be a need for the music we write. We are fortunate to be part of a canon of composers dating back centuries, and frankly, the world needs us. When this world offers more than we can bear, remember that what we do makes a difference, and remember that your art is worth every second.
*Opinions expressed on The CCCC Blog are reflections of the individual author, and may not represent all members of The CCCC Community.
Comments