Category: composition seminars
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Is tonality dead?
âThat autopilot mentality ⌠â and ditto the Classic BRITSâ smorgasbord of stale musical leftovers â freeload off the hard fought-for expressive truths of others, reducing to nought those dark, sometimes unknowable, contradictions that give composers of integrity a reason to get up in the morning. Tonality is asset stripped; removed from the context of…
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What constitutes success?
Self-mastery is the supreme victoryâ– much more to be valued than winning control over others. It is a victory that no other being whatsoever can distort or take away. The Dhammapada (attr. to SiddhÄrtha Gautama aka Buddha) What constitutes success in music and musical composition? High profile popular artists like Robin Thicke are considered runaway…
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The voice in modern composition
There are natural limitations of the human voice which present us with challenges. Amongst these are the difficulty of pitching by earâas opposed to most instrumentsâ fingering or key systemsâand the concomitant difficulty of realising fast moving lines. There are also the demands and constraints of the specifically Western classical vocal technique, which to at…
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Is there a common practice in modern composition today?
If we look back to the compositional world surrounding Bach and Handel, or Mozart and Haydn, most people will see more stylistic commonalities than divergences. Is this merely due to historic distance, i.e., that the passage of time makes us less sensitive to difference and more likely to aurally homogenise widely varying styles? Or was…