Embracing Your Inner Theorist

Almost invariably, young composers join my studio with little to no formal training in composition.  Occasionally they had the good fortune of going to a high school that offered a theory class.  More typically, they simply possessed a predilection toward creativity, a will to invent, and an ear that did its very best to assimilate and reconfigure the music they had already heard.  Composing, at this stage, is an often enchanting, usually mysterious, and nearly always intuitive process.  Sometimes I think of Sesame Street’s Don Music as a patron saint of composers at this stage.  You remember Don Music, don’t you?  He was the shaggy-haired, short-tempered composer often given to head-banging tantrums when the final notes of a piece were just beyond the grasp of consciousness (apparently, Don Music was discontinued after reports surfaced of very young piano students bludgeoning themselves with their piano keyboards). 

There is a part of me that maintains a tremendous affection for Don.  I mean, on the one hand, Don is an enormously benevolent character.  His ambition does not comprise imperialistic exploitation, political office, or the Dark Arts.  Don is relentlessly in search of what Plato might call “The Good” or “The Beautiful.”  Had Don surfaced as a cultural phenomenon in another era, we might say that his pursuit yearned toward his own “Immortal Beloved.”  I daresay that having spent most of my life in pursuit of seductive, and often fugitive, sounds that there is a bit of Don in me that shall ever remain—the trace of a tendency toward visceral abandon in the throes of the creative labor.  Problem solving? Hardly! Structural deconstruction? Never!  Sometimes, one must simply thrust their head against the keyboard and allow the tears to freely flow.

The academic experience, on the other hand, tends to educate the ‘Don’ right out of us.  Let me qualify that: while Don may ultimately disappear from the studio, he most certainly resurfaces in all of his befuddled and hotly passionate glory in faculty meetings and before students in high-profile guest residencies where truly there are no words to express what the heart and tongue are wont to proclaim in piercing decibels.  No, we teach our students to begin thinking like musical mechanics and problem solvers.  Cool under fire, because we in essence extinguish the fire.  Composition becomes in such circumstances a ‘Jeux de Cartes,’ as it were, with all motion premeditated to the extent possible, and each choice thoroughly rational based upon the ‘cards’ one draws (or is dealt) at the outset of a piece.  While we might favor a discussion of the ‘deck’ for another day, suffice it to say that the ‘deck’ could represent the arbitrary choosing of structural material, with its inherent probabilities.  We are no longer “composers” in such circumstances, but “problem solvers,” solving “compositional problems.”  I admit that I too am regularly seduced by this notion.  After all, it is much closer to diffusing a war through diplomacy, or “just talking things out” as an alternative to fisticuffs.

So, here are our student composers—ready to fight the good fight upon arrival, well accustomed to the impassioned search for just the right sonority.  How do we respond?  We as academics, historically skilled at repressing our emotions and the unquantifiable, hand them Schoenberg Op. 25, Webern Op. 28, Berg’s Lyric Suite and Messiaen’s Modes of Durations and Intensities.  We teach them about compositional transparency, the imposition of limitations, and the value of rationally defending every note.  Somehow, and maybe whether we intend it or not, we teach that value is ultimately decided through explicability.  After all, such things can be deduced entirely through the means at our disposal.  We teach Don Music about ordered sets, permutations, and time point systems—that the mysteries of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” might possibly be illuminated through inversionally-related hexachords.  

Let me be clear and propose that we do need to educate Don.  Don must understand that sooner or later all of that head-banging will lead to memory loss and hot flashes.  Student composers must begin to understand that there is a good kind of discrimination as the component parts of a piece are assembled.  There must be grounds for understanding which notes belong and which do not at any given moment.  The first partitions that a student draws in his or her work represent the first exhilerating brush of the hand of structure.  At first blush of this realization, the student experiences composition as a discipline.  The adroit student recognizes the inherent paradox that begins to emerge: the asymmetrical and irrational will toward invention and construction confronts the rational will to decompose and deconstruct.  A kind of compositional "Liebestod," it is at once a pretension to simultaneously bury and unearth.  I suppose that when my career as a composition teacher expires (or my bodily self--whichever comes first), the most common dilemma with my students will be this: how does one construct and deconstruct at once? How does one not knowing, know?

It is here, dear colleagues, that we will join hands or part ways, time ultimately telling who, in fact, took the "road less travelled by" that made all the difference.  I also suppose that our own creative biases emerge in the addressing of this question, as no honest or self-aware composer can avoid the 'unstoppable force' meeting the 'immovable object.'  In my own teaching, I try to cultivate in my students a harmonious duplicity between composer and theorist.  In my studio, the composer must lead and may in fact lean toward "not knowing" as the motives and gestures persevere into the darkness of the unknown.  The creative impulse manifesting itself in combinations of tones can often possess a will not of our making, and we are left to discern that will and pave its way forward accordingly.  If the process at this point invites struggle, so be it.  That is, as the dearly-departed Nicholas Maw once described, "the labor of composition."  

At the same time, while the Superego must restrain the Id, the inner theorist must give the composer pause.  New ideas and sounds, like a troubled soul, must find refuge in the brief psychoanalytical relationship with the theorist.  In my work, the theorist is rarely a prophetic or prescriptive agent, but rather a wise counselor, ever inviting the creative impulse to reflect upon itself and discover its contours--engaging its subject in a compassionate Socratic method of self exploration.  "No," it says, or "yes," it responds to what the impulse might be.  Never does it prescribe a path toward the future, but always a crystalline view of the past.  Having understood its history, the inner composer can forge ahead with renewed wisdom and confidence in its identity.  Here, Don Music is given license to continue on toward the darkness, until once again the theorist is invited to emerge from the shadows of the past and offer perspective.