Mindsets about Learning to Compose

One of my personal pet peeves are Youtube videos that are titled something like "8 steps to write like John Williams" or "10 Top Orchestration Tips" etc. Unfortunately, this approach has even spread towards more serious educational online outlets that claim to be crash courses in film scoring etc.

In fact, I cannot even count how many times in my own professional career I got emails asking something like "What are the most important orchestration rules?".

Of course this is not a problem that is exclusive to the field of music composition but in any job that requires a lot of work there is a big field of people thinking that there is a way to cut corners.

I had one key moment of realization some time in my early 20s when I had the honor of working on a project with a seasoned BBC veteran orchestrator who was well in his late 50s at that time  who told me "You know, Robin, every time I record with an orchestra, I learn something new, it really is fascinating." And now, more than 10 years later I totally understand what he meant. Of course, you develop a certain routine and gather experience of just knowing what works and what doesn't but you feel that every time you really dive into writing music or working with musicians you stumble across things that you hadn't considered before or that under the specific circumstances of the project offer a new angle to look at things.

The educational system (even the traditional university based one) very often implies a target oriented education. "If you do 4 years of study, you are a professional composer". 

The general mindset that often is communicated is that you need to struggle through a phase of learning and study in order to reach the goal of having all the knowledge and being able to compose awesome music.

In my opinion this is a fundamentally wrong approach. Learning to compose is A LOT of hard, often frustrating, always laborous but also rewarding work. But so is composing music at any level of professionalism. Writing music never gets easier. Even John Williams has mentioned in several interviews how hard it is for him to come up with music.

So the often seen mindset of "I need to work hard now learning all this stuff so things will become easy afterwards" is wrong. And this is where in my opinion all these courses and youtube videos that claim to give you shortcuts to writing amazing music kind of don't get the point.

The driving force that pushes any composer forward should be an intrinsic curiosity. You simply feel like you want to figure out how this works, you want to know why you should write the chord for brass like this and not like that, you want to understand why Tchaikovsky's melodies are so incredibly catchy.

This curiosity is why composers go through the struggle of always going back to that score sheet or DAW in spite of it being incredibly hard. And this curiosity is why deep down you shouldn't have that desire to cut corners.

Of course, when starting out, the overwhelming fascination of the ability of some composers to write music is often romanticised in the form of "I wish I could write music like this" but the prospect of putting years of study into it to get to the same level is off-putting so being lured by things like "Learn to compose in 5 easy steps" is understandable.

But the essential thing here is that the process of learning when done in the right environment comes with a huge amount of constant rewards. Figuring out how something works, realizing you have written your first halfway decent melody, getting your first piece performed by real musicians can be incredibly rewarding moments that fuel enthusiasm to continue.

However unfortunately, I see a lot of learning composers who still feel like they would prefer skipping the learning part and get right to being awesome composers which is incredibly dangerous and often source for frustration. Seeing dozens of videos and courses that suggest that it is super easy to just apply a handful of rules to write great music but realizing that in spite of following these rules your music still isn't great can be a huge source of frustration and make you doubt your general ability and talent etc.

All these flashy promises to quickly get to great results usually backfire pretty badly. Even if they explain a few concepts, applying those without understanding their reasoning will become frustrating very quickly and make you feel like a one trick pony.

So the bottom line here should be that in case you feel like cutting corners might be desirable when studying composition, you are missing out on all the fun that comes with diving into it. Try focussing on the fascination, passion and love that you have for music and not so much on the results. Sometimes, writing a piece that eventually ends up in the trash bin can be a huge eye opener. 

Of course this very strongly touches on specific character traits that you need to have to enjoy learning. But if you made it to this Patreon page and you feel like investing money is a good idea to read about these things that are covered here, I would presume that you have that internal curiosity to really dive into these topics. And of course, sometimes educational material that claims to have shortcuts is either interesting or even amusing to watch or read. But the essential point to hopefully take away from this is that nothing replaces studying and with composition, the driving force should always come from the path and not the target.