Is Composition a Theoretical or a Practical Subject? - by Pat McNeil

Editor's note: This is one of my favourite articles on the subject of composing for any genre of music for it's humour, irreverence, and it's practicality. It's written by Patrick McNeil and is the text from a speech he gave in 2000.

You can find out more about Pat at www.patmcneil.org.

Is Composition a Theoretical or a Practical Subject?

A lot has been made, historically, about composers. About what we do, who we are, and the strange by-product of our efforts: music.

I can recall an event that took place about 6 or 7 years ago that illustrates this. I was at a waterpark with my then-girlfriend, and a number of her friends, none of whom were particularly musical. Over lunch, one of them, upon hearing that I was a composer, launched into a statement that went something like this: "Wow, that's so cool. What's it like to live like that, always in throes of inspiration and passion?"

Looking up from my soggy french fries, I replied in as bored a tone as I could muster, "It's okay."

The picture is ridiculous. There exists this idea that composers are all monomaniacs, frothing at the mouth and living out angry existences in some form of architectural monstrosity known as an ivory tower.

At the other end of the spectrum, another idea exists, equally absurd: "Ve are in ze laboratory of ze evil doktor Sharpzundflattz, who is busily formulating his new composition."

Which stereotype you prefer depends if your idea of a composer-monomaniac is influenced by Beethoven or Stockhausen. A caricature of a 19th century romantic or a 20th century avant-gardist.

Composition is neither of these things, although there's a grain of truth under both of these grotesques.

I'd like to deal with the raving inspiration idea first. It will no doubt come as a surprise to many that creating music is not primarily a matter of inspiration. What I mean by this little heresy is this - inspiration provides the impetus for creating music. It doesn't provide the music itself.

Why compose? We do it for a lot of reasons. We compose because we're in love. We compose because someone has asked us to. Because we saw a nice sunset. Because the lid of the piano was open. Because we got paid to do so. Sometimes we compose because we're bored. And sometimes - more often than not, in fact, we compose because it sounds cool.

All music starts with an idea. Where does this idea come from? God? A hallucination? That inspiration thing we keep talking about? I don't really know.

Almost anyone can come up with a theme or a musical idea. Some of the most famous - say, the opening of Beethoven 5, are simple, almost to the point of being banal. Coming up with ideas, good, bad, and indifferent is easy. Any passably musical person could've come up with two or three or more since I've been standing here talking.

It's never a question of what to do. The question is what to do next.

You see, a piece of music is not made up of inspirations and emotions and all that other stuff. It is made up of notes. After hearing a piece, and experiencing all those feelings and emotions and so on, there is a tendency to assign all those qualities to the music itself. They aren't there. They are in you, not the music. The music can, of course, unlock those things in you. Nonetheless, the fact remains, that's you, not the music. The music is just the notes. The composer's problem then, is what to do with the dots.

The art of composition is simply the imposition of structure on sound. No more, no less.

I've been inspired by a lot of things in my musical life. The Moon, for instance, provided me with enough grist to mill out an hour's worth of music a few years back. At other times, such things as blackbirds, murder mysteries, trees, machines, cities, street people, a walk on the beach with a beloved friend, the rhythm of traffic, and drunken folk singers have all done the trick. But all those ideas would be just that - ideas, and not finished pieces of music, if it weren't for this ability to impose structures on sounds.

So, again, what to do with the dots?

I would argue that form is the single, overriding concern of music. To discuss form is to raise a number of questions, first of which is why bother having form at all? The simple answer is that form, of some sort, is inevitable. The practical answer is that completely random music gets boring in a hurry. Further, there is some question as to whether truly random music is even possible. The real question, I suppose, is how much form you wish to use in your work, and what nature of form do you wish to employ.

After any given musical event, you really only have four choices. You can repeat what you've just done verbatim, you can repeat with a variation, you can do something different, or you can stop. There are no other choices.

Simple, isn't it?

At core, we are concerned only with these four things - repetition, variation, contrast, and knowing when to shut up. So much for angst and being in the throes of passion.

Technique raises a number of interesting points. A musician is almost always expected to be an idiot-savant. Everything is supposed to be instinctive, and if we rely on technique of any sort, people often react like we're just pulling off conjuror's tricks and not really making music. Any sort of cerebral involvement in music is viewed as artifice, as elitist, and regarded with no small degree of suspicion.

So now we come to that other stereotype, the cold clinician writing music.

This is something that really grew out of the 20th century in general, and in particular with a phenomenon known as "music theory". Theory is a perfectly legitimate and useful discipline. It's facets are many, and fascinating.

The problem is this: In many places, the creation of music is considered a theoretical subject. Moreso than anything else, it is this perception - often caused by the musicians themselves - that have made composers increasingly irrelevant to the average listener.

I am a practicing musician. I am a composer, and my experience of composition is practical, not theoretical. Each day I have to deal with the physical existence of those things which I use in the creation of my art. I don't lounge about floating theories for the sake of it - I test them in practice.

You see, you don't learn to compose through theory. You learn to compose through practice. The best, and only way to learn how to write music is to actually write music. It's that simple. I can talk to you all day - indeed, all year - about set theory and modes and scales and rhythms and orchestration and tone generators and oscillators and so on. But you'll never become a composer until you actually take that stuff in hand and make music with it.

One of the problems we've had in this century is the habit of theory preceding practice. I would argue - and this is an exceedingly unpopular opinion, I might add - I would argue that this is a bad thing. The practice of composition should come first and the theory later. Music by numbers is generally boring. While some of the greatest music of all time has been produced in last 100 years, I think we've also produced some pseudo-scientific music that's almost unlistenable. It isn't just a matter of connect the dots - without some animating spirit, you're going to end up with some damned boring music.

The thing about theory is this - it is a tool. Being competent in music theory no more makes you a composer than owning a paintbrush makes you a painter.

These things you learn about music are tools. With these tools, you can make things. The tools themselves are neutral - it is neither a bad or a good thing to have them. It is in how they are employed. You need to know how to bring all these great ideas to life, or no one will ever hear them. Also, the more tools you have at your disposal, the more things you can make.

I said at the beginning that there was a grain of truth in both inspiration and technique. I see it when I teach - in small children that come into the conservatory and begin playing little games to learn the names of notes and how the rhythm goes and so on. Music exists in every one of those hopeful little faces. To them, at first, perhaps it is just a game. We go on in music, and we do new things, we learn more. We acquire technique, we dream big dreams. But we still play games with music. This is in fact a great deal of fun. Yet, in order to be free, we submit to a sort of discipline, which is technique. It is the paradox of music. But we do call it playing music, after all.

The object of the game is balance. The game, the fun stuff, is still very much in progress.

Your move.

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