Why I started composing
It’s fairly evident that I also compose music (in the classical sense) when I’m not actively performing. Seeing as I’ll never perform again in an professional ensemble this year and maybe even next year, I figured with all of this new time I need to find a way to make it worthwhile. I tried to read a new book but I find my inhibition from being forced to read so much when I was younger killed it for me. I tried a new sport namely tennis. While I like it, it’s a sport that takes time which if I had stayed put in Lafayette, I maybe would be able to do so. Perhaps later I’ll do this. But the one thing that has been constant is that of composition. I didn’t imagine myself originally being a composer. But like always, it is the things you never expect that take a hold in life.
So why did I start composing? I answered this briefly in my “Q&A” post but here’s an expanded answer. I started (seriously) composing during one of the worst years of my life (2011-2012). I was away from the friends I made and was expecting to launch myself into the conservatory world for the rest of my college days after graduating high school. Anyways, my first ever piece was a viola trio “Nocturne of Themes of Shostakovich.” It coincided with rehearsing and performing the Ninth Symphony (Shostakovich) and also myself going on a listening spree of all of his major works. I believe there was some sightreading of the piece but it has never been performed. There are issues that I would later work out in my later and current pieces like having a legible and clean score. Like with most beginning composers, I sought to imitate certain styles as I was unsure as to where my own voice would lead me. Sure I had amazing theory teachers on my side (thanks by the way) and was attempting to transcribe techno for string quartet, but my own original music? No way I thought. Everything I had learned about had been done. What could I possibly add to the musical canon of dead white people?
The answer was nothing. In that sense at least. Surely I wasn’t going to be the next John Williams or Maurice Ravel or god forbid the next JS Bach. But that didn’t stop me from writing. I started to dive deeper into contemporary music and there’s something about it that I can relate to. Whether it’s the sonic pain of dissonance or the purity of those perfect intervals or the point non-melodic things, there’s something about it that composers like Brahms, Schumann, Schubert and others just don’t give me. Obviously the time gap is a factor as well. I’ve yet to write a good symphonic work because one time, and two that’s a lot to deal with and three I tend not to write things that are longer than 15 minutes (my Violin Sonata being the exception). But really the biggest reason was that I was a very angry child growing up for multiple reasons. That’s exhausting to say the least and so if I wasn’t allowed to be a person, then I could do so through writing music.
In short or TLDR as the young kids say, I started writing music because I wanted to hear and perform different music rather than the same things over and over again. There’s so much out there and while I’ll get to it all, I want to perform and write as much as possible. So here’s to a medium I never got a degree in and yet am potentially finding better future success in.
Link to newest piece - https://youtu.be/rRuadHAEmVk