Finding Your Authentic Voice in Composition: Working With Restrictions

Once someone is bitten by the composing bug, creating your own music can feel exhilarating and intoxicating. For most composers, it feels like a part of ourselves that we have never been able to express is now being given a voice. Composing new music can feel like an outpouring, an act of pure expression.

But this feeling, as great as it is, only lasts for so long. After some time, new composers begin to have the space to listen to and assess their own music, and at this point, disappointment can often begin to set in. What felt like a genuine, authentic expression from the depths our own souls begins to sound derivative, like we are speaking with someone else’s voice, that our expression has evaporated in regurgitated snippets of Chopin, Stravinsky, The Beatles, Radiohead, and bluegrass strung together.

What happened?

In teaching composition, there are two paths that students must walk with the guide of an experienced teacher. First, students need to learn that nothing they compose will ever be truly new. This isn’t a flaw of this particular hypothetical student, of course; this applies to all composers, ever, from Beethoven to Quincy Jones. Acceptance of this is crucial in overcoming the dominant cultural narratives in our society about the ideas of “genius” and “originality.” In short, the more critical distance composers put between themselves and toxic idealism about originality, the sooner they can compose with an unencumbered creativity.

However, this path by itself has its own dangers. There is a kind of logic that, if nothing is original or new, then the only thing that truly matters is the feeling of authenticity. If a composer feels like they are writing what they want to write, then that is all they need to do. Be true to yourself and compose what you feel like.

So, what’s the problem with this? Well, there can be a gulf between what we compose and how we feel about what we compose. Our creativity gets channeled through ideas, patterns, and habits we have internalized unintentionally and we can unintentionally reproduce them. This can be insidious because it means that we are not composing what would really be true to us, just something kind of similar but that follows conventions we are not even aware of. Relying solely on one’s own feelings about what one is creating leads to the automatic reproduction of preexisting relationships within music. This needs a little unpacking, especially in how this problem is different from the issue of originality.

When I was an undergraduate at Oberlin, one of my composition teachers talked about the difference between composing in an atonal, avant-garde sound world and composing in traditional tonality. He said there is no rule saying that one cannot write in an older, tonal language, but that it is immensely more difficult to do so well.

Tonality is like a language. There is a set of basics objects, or notes, that can be combined in various patterns to create larger structures, such as scales, keys, or chords. There is also a “grammar” of a sort that organizes how the basic objects and larger structures interact with each other simultaneously (harmony) and sequentially (melody and rhythm). This grammar is less a set of rules, as it is often taught in theory classes, and more a set of probabilistic expectations that all people who can hear and grow up with Western music internalize through constant exposure to tonal music. Tonality is our native musical language.

These expectations are roughly universal, which is why music works (not to put too fine a point on it!). If these expectations about how the basic objects of tonality were not roughly universal, then the power of music to express different affects would fail. Nobody listens to the beginning of the Star Wars fanfare and thinks it sounds spooky, tragic, or angry. We all generally agree on what feeling that music is eliciting within us. Even though the vast majority of people in our society wouldn’t know what a C major chord is or what a whole-tone scale is, we all share the same expectations about how tonal music functions that allows music to be expressive and meaningful to us. We are all fluent in tonality, though almost none of us are literate in it.

The expectations that we all learn that feel inherent to tonality exert themselves over composers as we compose, too. This is what I mean when I say that if a composer only relies on what they feel, then they will be reproducing, uncritically, the expectations, structures, and objects of tonality.

This is where the second path towards learning to compose with authenticity comes in. We need restrictions to get us out of our automatic reflexive tonal training.

Restrictions of various kinds force us to examine what we want to compose and how we need to compose it. It leads us to creating compositional strategies and techniques that help us in all of our work. Restrictions of various kinds can be used in short composition exercises or within larger pieces.

What are some of the most common and helpful composition restrictions? Here are a few:

•Compose only a melody, with no accompaniment. Choose basic parameters in advance (key, time signature, range, number of measures, tempo) in advance and do not deviate from them.
•Compose a piece for a single note.
•Learn how to compose strict counterpoint.
•Compose a piece where every note comes from a single motive, allowing for motivic variations such as inversion, transposition, rhythmic variation, etc.
•Choose a genre or style and compose a piece in that style (minuet, fugue, waltz, ragtime, etc.)

By composing with these kinds of restrictions, the student learns more about what they are truly interested in in music and how to make that happen, even in extreme circumstances. This will help them to compose with greater authenticity in any harmonic language, even tonality.

Other types of restrictions always occur in the real world of composing. These include the instrumentation of a chamber group (no trumpets in a string quartet!), the minimum or maximum length of a piece, the difficulty level of the piece (for professionals, amateurs, or students), thematic elements, and other limits. If a composer learns the value of restrictions in composing, then these can all help a composer to make expressive and authentic music!