Arbitrary governance
I’ve taught composition as a casual academic at universities since 2015. This semester I took a break to take stock and re-evaluate things. In the spirit of Corita Kent, Anne Boyer, Lebbeus Woods, Lawrence English, and others, over this ten year period, I’ve experimented with making and suggesting ‘rules’ of composition, playful and pastoral generalisations that aim to help students get through their music degrees and cultivate a meaningful life in music. I’ve written ten of these, arranged loosely from novice to graduation. I must stress their temporal specificity as circumstantial to the last ten years only—their utility in deeper throes of permanent crisis may not hold. I follow these 'rules' with a longer exploration of perspectives on compositional practice that may reduce suffering or provide more nourishment.
As with all arbitrary governance of artistic process, this is an exercise in hubris. I submit this squeamishly.
Keep the ear moving
When beginning, we often face the prospect of filling time like a burden. This can induce anxieties that occlude listening. Listen to work you enjoy and notice how your ear gravitates, anticipates, attends to, and deviates from the sounds you hear. Take this attention seriously as a compositional resource. Take notes of its whims; it is often correct. Even in silence and repetition, our ear wanders. Conversely, rote tropes halt the ear, no matter how intricate and intentional the music is. If you’ve listened to music and thought “I get the idea,” you know what this feels like. This is both a compositional guide and encouragement to listen to lots of different musics, especially when you are beginning, to learn how your ear moves.
Let material think
Beginners often think of sound as an inert medium for communicating the whims of a deep, brooding mind. Or they build elaborate concepts over weeks before making any sound, inevitably getting bored and abandoning it the moment it attains any material reality, starting from scratch with the deadline now much sooner. The error here is interpersonal; it assumes sound is not a collaborator. Embrace the more-than-human agency of sound. Let it direct you by letting it be of its own mind. Developing this intuition takes time because it is unambiguously unique to you. I like Chris Madak’s variation on this theme: “The finished work can never be seen ahead of time … if it could, there would be no reason to make it.”
Make your own wind
Not a fart joke, but the words of runway coach J. Alexander in the reality TV show America’s Next Top Model. If memory serves, he gave this advice while teaching models to catwalk. He is referring to creating the illusion of dramatic movement. If you walk with enough speed, a particular bounce and gait, long hair can seem like it’s blown back by a breeze, creating the impression of walking into the wind or, more powerfully, being in command of it. It’s all about momentum. Momentum is not implied; it must be stated.
Take your music for a walk
Touch grass. Breathe well and move. Keep the ear moving by keeping the body moving. The relation between sonic, somatic, and scenic is effervescent in its moments of resonance. Record yourself or export your work-in-progress, then take it for a walk. Let it wander. Note any observations of how your work interacts with the environment, an environment that includes you. Integrate it into your process at every step. If recordings are not your jam, cultivate the soundwalk; with consistent practise it can expand your listening capacity. Listen with your body. A walk can also be a dance.
One for the punters, one for the heads
A straightforward oblique strategy. When music risks becoming too heady, or so mellifluous it loses all friction, sneak in its inverse. This is the least interesting ‘rule,’ but perhaps the most auspicious.
Make your own scales and do them
In music performance contexts, scales, rudiments, breath work, etc., help warm up the body and hone the ear. They work, but only if they’re relevant to your practice. With emergent instruments like DAWs, you don’t get better at them by doing C major scales. But maybe you’ll get better at them if you design a small sound from scratch before you start compositional work. This means strategically identifying the actions you’d like to affirm, and then doing them. Offload some of the effort of composition with the effort of practise with an 's': rehearsal, routine, commitment to muscle memory. Composition is a performing art too. (In the digital music space, making templates and presets is not the same as habitually and skilfully using them.)
Seize your means of production
A koan for artists, both deeply personal and totally collective. No view is too expansive in working through this koan. It could be a way to guide your ’gear acquisition syndrome,’ an imperative to take seriously the means you already have, to cultivate mutual distribution networks, to tear down the gates you inadvertently keep. I find it difficult to apprehend working in a medium saturated with prosumerism, but one thought experiment that has helped me work through it: in what ways can my musical practice be a microcosm of a better possible world?
Write no matter what
There is a modern tension in Corita Kent’s rule that “the only rule is work.” This may have motivated student artists when education was free or cheap, but at face value it’s harder to justify when today's students are working four precarious jobs on top of their debt-ridden studies to stay alive. But writing every day—music or text or whatever else—no matter what, in spite of it all, builds important skills: to rest on the page, to slow the work down, to cherish process over product, to collect your thoughts, to play with them safely, to move on. Sadly, this is most accessible to the already privileged. Keeping a journal may be enough. Julia Cameron’s ‘morning pages,’ three pages daily of stream-of-consciousness writing advocated in her book The Artist’s Way, is a habit I recommend if you’re not time-poor. Joli Jensen’s insistence to write no matter what six days a week, even if it’s a 15-minute rant about how shit it all is, is another. (This can apply to musicking at whatever quantum works for you. One recording a day, one minute a day, one line of manuscript a day, etc..) To write no matter what isn’t to fetishise productivity or to denigrate rest. It’s to hold space for a more important kind of flourishing. You will. The only rule is keep going.
Hold faith
As impoverished billionaires rush to instrumentalise all of music into palliative ambience, the meaningfulness of the work becomes exposed, picked at by vultures. For some musicians, it is too much to bear. More need, then, to galvanise our practice and call it what it is: an act of faith. That’s not necessarily a suggestion to find religion, rather it’s a call to locate fervour in the ideas, practices and kinships that compel us toward what we do not know, to animate possibility, to socialise the imagination. I’ve found comfort in the belief that ’the process’ always works, especially at its slowest, most confusing points, because the process is life and the only rule is keep going. When music starts to feel like a lost cause, I hold faith that while I am temporarily lonely, I am not alone. These vulgar clichés work, if you believe in them. In the wide open space of post-institutionalised composition, you need new structures to hold you to the work of living and making; realigning your beliefs can help. Befriending a few folks with similar beliefs may be all that is needed to make a life in music viable.
Always teach
In the west, music is usually understood as a vehicle of self-expression. Take leave of this as soon as you can. Your feelings are not that important. Your listeners don’t care either, beyond the prism of their own. Instead, orient your practice towards musicking as teaching, the provision of a spacetime for learning. What you want people to learn—or, crucially, yourself, for teaching is often inward—is up to you, but be careful about making you the object lesson. The best way to learn is through trust; to teach is to hold that trust and not just illuminate but reassure others of their own luminosity, their own capacities to attend to the seemingly inscrutable. It’s honest, accountable, receptive, and generative. Musicking as teaching is agnostic to style—as relevant to a songwriter’s discovery of clarity amid emotional turmoil as to a transdisciplinary art collective’s pursuit of better Marxisms—yet it is keenly aware of situational context. It is resistant to co-optation by managerialist technologies (e.g. algorithmic cultural indexing and the bad apples of generative AI). It can be a bulwark against the violent moment your work becomes someone else’s content.
Of course, teaching is not incorruptible. Moral didacticism, proselytisation, manipulation, empty container pedagogy, denial of reciprocity, exploitation, mansplaining, ‘heroic teacher’ grandstanding, and the rots and conceits of higher education too numerous to list (and too consequential to my income for me to be specific about), are symptoms of a lack of trust. All teachers falter on these from time to time because trust is not easily wielded by tired, stressed and under-resourced people. But there are many better ways to teach. We don’t really know how music teaches, or even what music can do, but it does, and the possibilities therein animate a global community of practice that is as meaningful as it is precisely because it exceeds decoration and catalyses transformation, vitalisation, even liberation, however fleetingly or subtly. At its best, teaching is simply the most rewarding cultural practice in the collective life of the world. “Small wonder, then,” writes Parker Palmer, “that teaching tugs at the heart, opens the heart, even breaks the heart—and the more one loves teaching, the more heartbreaking it can be. The courage to teach is the courage to keep one's heart open in those very moments when the heart is asked to hold more than it is able, so that teacher and students and subject can be woven into the fabric of community that learning, and living, require.”
Consider this hypothetical: you’re a music composition student in the thick of semester in the second half of your degree. Maybe you had a rough week. Life got in the way, but now you’ve finally got a few hours to make music, this thing you’ve been told you’re good at. You’ve stewed on some compelling ideas since you received the brief. They sound great in your head. You’ve got a goal, enthusiasm, clarity. But when you sit down and start, it all seems impossible to grasp. You try to make something, anything, and each material step in the process feels heavy, like the idea you’re magnetically attracted to is being pushed away by your own clumsy, opposing action. You distract yourself with your phone because that’s less shameful than confronting this edifice to your own mediocrity, not just musically but personally, because despite knowing better, deep down a part of you believes that music represents the self who made it, and you refuse to be perceived as poorly as whatever the hell this is. A few hours pass and you rationalise that, in action alone, what you’ve made with formidable strain could’ve been made in five minutes if you weren’t jostling so pointlessly with your ego. You’re exhausted and crestfallen, demoralised, desperate. You compare it to the best music ever written. You assess yourself like a manager giving a stern performance review. You use words like ‘procrastination’ and ‘unproductive.’ Less effort is not an option. You repeat it all next week, maybe with a despotic severity, a neoliberal calculus, a pulverising fatigue, rarely with affection or kindness.
You question why you began a music degree at all. Your family don’t like your music (they don’t actually say this but you suspect their unconditional support masks some grave concern), your friends don’t like your music (they say they do but you don’t trust their judgement because they actually make great music), you don’t like your music (even though you know you’ve got so much promise). At the outset, it seemed like a fun thing to do, a way to meet the coolest people in town, an institutionally sanctioned space to spend young adulthood living a deeply creative life—that is, in your estimate, a fun and rewarding life. Maybe you entertained some idea of stardom, of being beloved by others the way you love your favourite musicians. The school has a pretty good alumni list after all. But the thought begins to weigh: how many of your favourite musicians actually have music degrees? You start seeing through the institution’s PR, its illusion of democratised cultural production, and internalise the half- or quarter-truth that success in this domain does not come from a degree but brutal hard work. Concepts of work-life balance and burnout now apply to everyone except you. They are the stuff of normies, people who aren’t serious. The institution, pleased by this, rewards you with many granular opportunities. You say ‘yes’ to all of them. You figure that even if they’re terrible experiences, they would build character, accumulate the battle scars you would proudly wear. Well, here they are, singeing your skin in real time. Now you can barely write a few seconds of music without a crisis and you’re desperate to understand why you keep doing this to yourself. Maybe you’re just not cut out for this. You receive virtually no support apart from commiserations from equally beleaguered comrades. Everything you send to a collaborator or a teacher is bookended by revulsion and apology. A casual academic, paid ten to fifteen dollars to mark the piece you spent weeks on, listens to it once and somehow gives it 75% and a generic “Keep up the good work!”
What is the lens through which our hypothetical student views music? To this student, music is a prideful, puritan work. In music schools, in culture industries, and in an increasing proportion of our entire lives, we are conditioned to see our practice as work, and this can create turbulence when it is embedded in our cognitive and cultural infrastructures. Sometimes, obviously, it is essential to view our labour in this way. It may feel like we don't have the luxury to think otherwise. But we develop complex attachments to this way of looking at music that aren’t helpful or necessary at all times: music as transactional, as a service, as an obligatory CV item, as a side hustle, as content. Then there are more subtle unhelpful attachments: music as something reliably written on demand, as masterful, as an irrevocable item in your discography, as inherent to your identity, as compulsorily loved, as enacting a determinate social outcome, as somehow quantified against the cost of tuition, as less valuable if it’s not your full-time gig, as a labour of both joyful freedom and “the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion” (Marx!). Music as a life’s work. But this is just one way of looking at practice, one that capitalist social life accelerates as it infects deeper roots of practice and subject. This is one definition of neoliberalism.
Investigating other ways of looking at our practice can unsettle the cognitive blocks of our poor hypothetical student. Exploring these is a meaningfully creative, experimental, improvisatory act unto itself. What I’ve suggested in these ten arbitrary ‘rules’ are different ways of looking. In fact, why stop at ten? What if musicking is more like gardening? What if instead of punishing yourself for hitting a creative block, you look at the block with affectionate curiosity? What if effort is the hindrance? What if the idea of ‘procrastination’ didn’t exist? What if 'musicking as teaching' is not the perspective you need right now? What if composition is not the anxious coagulative monster you occasionally make it out to be, but an ecology of organisms, many of which are delightful and life-affirming? What if your inner critic is a cantankerous loser, an Ignatius J. Reilly-type character? Or maybe they are just awkward and want to help you live up to your full potential but they don’t know any other way than to yell at you? What if your music represents a fictionalised you? What if music is a meaningful and radical tradition because it is subatomically small, not because it encompasses entire worlds? What if, with absolute and unmistakable certainty, there is nothing mystical or transcendent about music, its creation, or its reception? Then what if the opposite is true? What if you’re not the first musician in history to wrestle with injurious perspectives, even though they seem very specific to your mentality, and that it is a sign of strength and maturity to ask for help with these quandaries? What if you and some comrades got together to flesh out a perspective you think is better and possible? Explore, improvise, play, experiment, document, reflect. These might look like platitudes, but they aren't quick fixes or theoretical playthings. They are perspectives embodied through practice. Maybe they don't have a lightening effect. Make better ones or ask around. Whatever ways of looking land well with you should be practised patiently. They rewire the brain very slowly, sometimes with great resistance. Trust that your brain is giving accurate signals when it needs to rest.
Plural onto-epistemologies of practice can help reduce the suffering that tends to come with composition, and mitigate the stereotype of the insufferably moody composer. There are infinities in this paradigm. Fluidity, adaptability, playfulness, curiosity, a certain polyphony of perspective, is the key skill here. It may lighten the necessary times when music must be work. Perhaps it's too late to confess I have limited evidence of the efficacy of this meta-practice over the number of years I would expect it to mature—it is intuited from the divergent perspectives of folks like Rob Burbea and Karen Barad, neither of whom are writing with aesthetic education first in mind. But it seems like a skill that would embolden our hypothetical student—do I continue the charade that they aren't a younger me?—to take gingerly the views and beliefs on practice that proliferate misery and to know that they are not to blame for holding them, are not "forever for all time a monad on its travels."
The arc of musical life is incomplete until it is not. Most people depart in their musical adolescence. Some people have their best practice in their eighties and beyond. Be patient; keep going.
