We all have our own way of working and understanding, maybe this helps you, maybe not. I can only share my thoughts with you and hope for the best. Of course, I will change my mind, Insights happen all the time, that’s what being an Artist is. A Work of Art is always in motion. But I’m trying to explain you the best I can in this moment.
Working from the traditional forms and harmonic progressions towards a personal musical voice is very hard. The ‘rules’ make it easy to write generally good sounding music, but hard to develop a personal style/sound. It’s a perfect system for ‘book-keepers-music’, it’s a bit like ‘painting by numbers’: your music will sound good, people will like you, but it will never Sound GREAT.
You can write music like a flower and put it in a pretty vase.
At best, you get an ecclectic style, combining and copying composers you like best, like John Williams did for his movies. Though his personal a-tonal work is very different, it’s worth checking him out as an example of a carreer you can build from this way of composing. John is the ultimate copy-cat, people love his music. That is because the theoretical system is a summary of everything people have loved in music before.
If that’s the carreer you want, please, do that!
It’s fast, clear and successful in the film- and game-industry.
You can make good money learning that Craft.
My advise is to stop reading here and do that.
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Now….
if you’re still with me……
You want something else ……
You Listen to music…..
but you don’t hear your heart…..
There is no “Dark & Light”…..
You Listen to music and hear a Void……
Something is missing…..
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For composers who want to make Art while uncovering the beauty of Craft, it’s easier to start from a personally preferred musical Architecture and start adding personally preferred chords and rhythms to that. You can uncover the Craft on the fly. You will recognize the “music-theory-things” once you wrote them. You will uncover new stuff that ‘s not in the theory. You will get interested in the abundance of musical history. All your Firsts will stay valuable until you write your Lasts. Your Work of Art will be coherent from the start. You will not be struggling with the direction of music theory, which points to the past.
But
The hard part shifts from “learning and behaving according to the system” to “letting go of your ego”. You have to fall and get up again, in front of a lot of people with a judging character. My first First was cow dung that fertilized my land.
You can’t start a garden with a flower.
I accept that, because all my Firsts will be in my book of Lasts. It’s the Beginning of a flow of endless Inspiration. Firsts are the seeds and water and earth and dirt of my Work of Art. I find that there is no such thing as a mistake in an Honest Try. There is “Take 1, Take a Listen, Take 2, Take a Listen … ” My Work of Art is developing, I don’t waste time on stuff I will never apply.
Traditional educational systems teach you “How? to What?” (Craft) but won’t teach you Why? (Art) I find it helpful to start from a “Why?” and let the musical composition be the answer to the “Why?” The audience hears a personal Quest for Truth, however “First-ly” it will sound. People that can Listen will forgive your lack of Craft, but never your lack of Truth.
Now, here comes the practical flip-side: After getting to know the Music, I have to write it down in a way musicians can play that. For weeks, I’m trying to get the Music fitting into the most familiar system, without suffocating it. It is the best system we know, until now, in which written music can be shared. It has it’s flaws, but it has to do.
Now you will understand that music percieved this way (“go to the piano and press the keys you like best”), will be impossible to analyse. There is no other thing to see than, in my case, the ruins of the original Architecture.
In my opinion, you can’t write meaningful climaxes using any system, nor copying any composer, because their hearts resonate differently from yours. But if you search for and express a personal ‘Why?’ Music starts sounding differently. Starting from a personal perspective, you can go all the way and get those great climaxes naturally. Music itself will help you becoming better at being you.
But I better warn you, that there is no hiding from yourself while standing in your own MUSIC. The first time, better sit on a chair. You have arrived in the world of Art. You will See Beauty.
Some Day, you might be staring at your own flowergarden.
But first you have to lay out and fertilize the flowerbeds.
