Every year Mike Verta discusses music from starting composers for a day. This year you can listen to Mike Verta Unleashed 6 A common error composers make is writing: disruptive, not understandable music or drop dead boring music. The first mistake is common because composers get used to their own music or bored with their… Continue reading How to comfort the Western ear
Blog
How Space, Time and FORM interact.
This blog will discuss how SPACE influences climaxes and silences while playing and composing music. It’s a difficult metaphor, but it works best for me, explaining to myself how to improve my climaxes and silences by adding SPACE for sound to thrive. The first time I heard my music, I was surrounded by me, magnified… Continue reading How Space, Time and FORM interact.
Form AND STORY: Why you cannot put a story into music.
When I took composing classes with Thomas Trachsel in 2018, he told me to ‘never write stories’. I thought at that time, what he meant was:” never write the sounds of a story in chronological order, because that is not music. You will end up with an emotionless list of events in sound. “ So,… Continue reading Form AND STORY: Why you cannot put a story into music.
The air-castle: Walls of music on stages
When we think about stage set-up, we often think about how the audience will see us, but hardly ever how they hear us. That is a missed opportunity, because not only the instruments ‘play the room’, so do the stages. The percussionists are often placed in the back of the stage on an elevated smaller… Continue reading The air-castle: Walls of music on stages
Black and White compositions: Over- and under-thinking musical ideas.
This blog is my train of thought on over- and underthinking musical ideas. This question is urgent for me today, because I am studying a new form, as taught in ‘Form the silent language’ by Hugo Norden. I am thinking a lot about form and the beauty of structures, energy-curves and frame-works in music in… Continue reading Black and White compositions: Over- and under-thinking musical ideas.
The vulnerability of the composer
It is difficult the reflect on vulnerability. We live in an environment where we tell mostly stories about heroes, you better battle and survive. There is only little attention and understanding for stories of vulnerability. But those are the stories we all know by experience: The randomness of disease, the risk of loneliness, loosing loved… Continue reading The vulnerability of the composer
What orchestration can do for your composition.
Orchestration is the fingerprint of the composer. All composers have a favorite mix of sound-colors, by the orchestration alone you can often already recognize a composer. Here is a famous example of a composition for piano, that is orchestrated by another composer: Pictures at an Exhibition, composed by Mussorgski, orchestrated by Ravel. Or listen to… Continue reading What orchestration can do for your composition.
Know it all, forget it, then write music.
Having classes in Germany, I told Stephen Melillo that I didn’t understand how I wrote all that music, it felt effortless, as if the music was coming to me. In return he told me an anecdote about one of the great composers who was found crying on the stairs, after a successful concert, because he… Continue reading Know it all, forget it, then write music.
A musician is not a conductor is not a composer.
Why are not all musicians also composers? Or conductors? They know everything there is to know about music, some of them are walking wikipedia’s, but still, they don’t write music. Why? Sunday I was at an organ concert and it dawned upon me, that the music did not ‘play the room‘. We heard the best… Continue reading A musician is not a conductor is not a composer.
Debussy
These quotes are written by Claude Debussy in his book ‘Monsieur Croche the Dilettante Hater’. I took some of them, because they made me think….I wrote down my thoughts just the way they came to me…and will probably rewrite them over time… On soloists The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like… Continue reading Debussy