People have been asking the question What is composition? and What is composition [in] music? with increasing frequency since Google started tracking trends in 2004. It’s a difficult question to answer, not least because any understanding of musical composition will be as different as one’s very definition of “music.” Would I confront the task now, I fear I’d stare at the proverbial blank page for weeks. But often it’s when we’re put on the spot and also prompted by a different but related question that the best answers to the most difficult questions emerge.
That’s what happened in 2017, when I gave an interview on creativity from my perspective as a historical composer. Everything in that interview was improvised (I was given no questions in advance), and in listening to it now in 2022 I’m both heartened and somewhat surprised to hear just how fundamental and unchanged my thinking remains. It’s certainly been refined in some ways, and I plan to write a reflection on that earlier interview soon that shows just how. But what I said in 2017 outlines certain fundamentals of musical composition from a historical perspective, core ideas to which I still wholeheartedly subscribe.
In Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven’s time, composition was all about musical models while finding one’s individual voice through shared cultural conventions. How to be immersed in convention and steeped in tradition without ever being conventional was the central aesthetic problem of the age.
Today I would describe it all as a sort of paradox: the greatest compositions are grounded in convention while being original. In Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven’s time, composition was all about musical models while finding one’s individual voice through shared cultural conventions. How to be immersed in convention and steeped in tradition without ever being conventional was the central aesthetic problem of the age. And it’s a conception of composition that has enormous implications involving culture and identity for 21st-century musicians who work with styles of the past.
Below is an unedited transcript of the main content of the interview (with headings and links added). You can also hear the original on YouTube.
Identity and finding your voice
The idea is to not try and mimic any one composer from the past but to try and reconstruct a kind of larger musical culture in order to find a voice within that time period—in the same way that presumably one would have found a voice back then. Even though they’re picking things up from their contemporaries, you’re kind of developing your own identity within that climate. And I think that’s one of the reasons why this whole enterprise gets kind of misunderstood: when people talk about period composition they think “oh I’m trying to compose like Mozart or like Beethoven or like Bach,” but the idea is more along the lines of trying to find myself—or someone else finding themselves—in the past, finding a voice in the styles and musical languages of the past. So it’s a complex project because it involves reconstruction, issues of identity. Why is it you want to identify with something that’s effectively dead?
Models of music and models of creativity
People who are interested in this kind of thing not only model the music on the music of the time period—meaning the musical models—but also the process, what we know about the creative process, the pedagogical process in the eighteenth century. So there’s a kind of a dual modeling happening: you’re using the actual musical models—whether we’re talking about large scale form or local-level phrasing—but also how they approached creativity or composition. We know for example that some of the greats (Bach and Mozart and Beethoven) started with pre-given materials. It was hardly ever this kind of pure, ex nihilo construction.
An example I always love to give, because it really gives you a sense of what composition was like in the time period, the Bach C Minor Passacaglia and Fugue. The subject that Bach uses—for the passacaglia and the fugue—comes from another composer, André Raison, although Bach does extend it some, and the extension is itself telling. But Bach’s voice is not really to be found in the melody, if we understand the melody as a subject, but in this edifice that he constructs. So, he’s clearly taking something from another composer but then building this gorgeous monument out of it. So, I mean that’s just one example, where they’re constantly taking pre-given materials. Mozart’s Requiem, I mean, I don’t even know if we should be calling it Mozart’s Requiem anymore; half of it is Handel, the rest of it is people who completed it, so . . . but still we sense Mozart in there somehow, rather than Handel or Süssmayr.
So, this idea of starting from pre-given materials as a kind of starting point, a problem-solving activity, inspiration, whatever the initial impetus might be, that’s part of the process. And then of course the idea that we’re constantly learning from models, even in the time period everything was exemplar based. In terms of teaching music, it was almost always by example. “You want to learn how to do this? Here’s how to do it. Here’s twenty ways how to do it, thirty ways how to do it. . .” And you just kind of abstract from those exemplars. A connection I like to make in my sophomore theory class which is kind of predicated on this period composition idea, getting them to compose or fill the shoes of historical composers, the main connection is jazz and pop music . . . because it’s highly conventional, it uses licks, and Mozart and Bach were not all that different.
The importance of listening
Joe Madden, Cubs manager, tells his players “Respect 90,” meaning 90 feet. I say respect 90, referring to the 90% of my listening diet. That’s all I listen to. So, from the time I was about, I don’t know, 20, 21, 90% of my listening is music from the long eighteenth century. So, it’s sort of this kind of immersion tactic. It’s not only because I enjoy the music, but I always viewed it as a kind of . . . an aspect of compositional training, just immersion, being saturated with that stuff. And it’s interesting; I often see, in the creative process, when things come out more instinctively, it’s almost always a reflection of what gets most reinforced in terms of my listening. So, you hear these, like, Bach-Beethoven hybrids coming out. Because if any two composers fill up the majority of that 90% it would be those two.
Originality by combining models
I think that is also an element of creativity, right, this idea of conceptual combination. At least in this book that I’m working on on this very subject, that’s one of the main arguments, which is that—because people say “oh, if you’re going to compose in historical styles, it’s all been done before.” Well, yeah, if you take a purely linear, teleological perspective and you assume that there was Bach therefore there was C.P.E. Bach, therefore there was J.C. Bach, therefore there was Mozart, therefore there was Beethoven. But that’s, that’s a fantasy, that’s not real. So one of the main arguments about this book is that J.S. Bach was largely forgotten, and they started to kind of rediscover him already in the late eighteenth century in very interesting ways. So that even someone like Beethoven could be read as not necessarily a direct successor to Mozart, but as a kind of going back to Bach while also being a successor to Mozart. All of this is to say that there are so many opportunities for combining patterns and elements and styles that existed in the eighteenth century in new ways—creating new musics, effectively, but in old styles.
The value of historical composition
I completely anticipate that some people will simply not take it seriously because it was composed today. That said, I remember one of my professors, James Hepokoski, in a seminar at Yale asking, “Let’s say you discover that a sonata that was composed by Mozart was actually by Stravinsky—would that lessen its value?” And I had certain ideas back then but now I have other ideas. Right now, I would say Stravinsky wouldn’t be able to do it, and I think that’s the value. Being able to reconstruct something—like I said—that is effectively dead, because nobody’s speaking like Mozart or Beethoven today. So, there’s value in the reconstruction. And then, the reconstruction itself has enormous implications regarding—whether you call it nostalgia or identity or. . .—it’s part of this broader movement of people going back to the past to kind of, I don’t know, find some kind of meaning or something they don’t see in today’s world. I think the historically-informed performance movement is all about this, effectively—you know, wanting to perform on old instruments using old techniques. In context, yes, it just seems like they’re trying to be historical, but at the same time it’s kind of trying to identify with something other than today. And there’s value in that, too. Taruskin, in his critiques of the HIP movement, he says, its authenticity is not in really reconstructing how it was done, but the fact that they are trying to do this reconstruction. This is being authentically post-modern, or what have you. So, it’s a different kind of authenticity. You know, it’s a thorny subject, to be sure. So, it’s not just about creativity, but creativity is sort of mixed in with all these other things involving history, and identity, and culture.