Maturing Voice as a Composer

In one of my previous posts, I mentioned that in my own personal musical history, there are parts of me that wish that I would have gone to music university a little later in my life and not already at 20 years old as I actually did. I feel that some more personal and musical maturity would have helped me to take more away from this. But then again, what does it actually mean to "mature" as a composer?

This of course is an incredibly personal question and I only can speak from my own experience but having composed music for more than 20 years now, I can at least make some long term observations in my own writing and how things changed over the years.

Mozart was considered to be a Wunderkind having written his first music at the age of 5. I always found it interesting to see that he had an incredible technical proficiency at a very young age and yet, his pieces sounded a lot like "Look what I can do!" In a way they were musically very advanced but also showed the temperament of a young boy.

Now I don't want to compare myself with Mozart by any means but at least for me, looking back at my own music, there are some parallels in this that I also see in my "early years".

Starting out, every new compositional device that I discovered felt like the holy grail and all my compositions suddenly included an excessive overload of these devices. When I first consciously discovered lydian, I was writing lydian music for three months, when I first discovered what an add9 in a chord does, I used it almost everywhere. There's of course nothing wrong in "trying out new toys" as it is an integral part of learning but when it shows in the music that you don't just write for yourself to test things out, it might become a bit obvious that you're just overdoing a certain single thing in it.

It took several years until I had worked my way through all relevant compositional devices and started to use them because the piece needed them, not because I just discovered them. I remember that in the first few years of learing to write music I gathered a lot of knowledge very quickly. However, all these things were so exciting and new that I only scratched the surface of many before something else came along that grabbed my attention. These years were like a sugar rush with me feeling like in a candy store and it showed in my compositions. For entertainment purposes, I attached a "Demo Reel" that I wrote in 2003 at the age of 19 at the bottom of this post. I remember that I wanted to touch on as many genres as possible showing what I can do. And as you can clearly hear they all sound like I had gotten the big gesture and idea of the idea that I wanted to bring along somehow right but on the other hand it feels like as if I painted it all with the really thick Edding and like this "Look what I can do" I mentioned earlier.

I would say that the phase where I really started to refine my skills started after I got my degree in composition. Until then, there was a blur of "first times" with music where I simply absorbed new concepts and ideas and tried them out once before moving on to the next one. After graduation, the frequency of such occurances got lower and I had time to revisit things and really explore them and understand where and when it would be appropriate to use and how I can sort them into my musical vocabulary.

The excitement of the "rush years" transitioned into a phase of refinement. Routine in using certain devices gave me more security in using them. And I got to a point where I could consciously connect different devices. Up to that point, there always was a focus on a specific thing that excited me at that time and just as with cooking, I tended to use way too much of that new spice that I just had discovered.

Additionally, a degree of personal growth also had an influence on my music. Working in the field of media music, transporting emotion through music is one of the daily businesses. Understanding the visual but also emotional language of for instance a film and translating it to music takes a certain degree of emotional maturity. I stated it before how important it is to practice music that expresses small emotions as media composer and I wish I could tell this to my younger self. The first few movies I did, the score I wrote was like I turned the emotional intensity of the cues to 11. Someone is sad - I wrote a cue that overboiled in desparation. Something funny happening on screen - I opted for a silly slapstick score.

In the last couple of years, I feel like I have gotten my musical vocabulary all sorted nicely and easily accessible that I can use it intuitively and focus on the actual music. 

Of course none of that happened suddenly as you constantly keep refining your musical vocabulary and I hope that I will continue to grow but then again, it seems like composing is a life long process.

Getting away from my own musical development, it is very often interesting to observe how composer's voices change over the decades. A prime example here would be John Williams. One can quite clearly say that the 70s/80s John Williams sounds very different to the 90s John Williams who again sounds very different to the 2000s John Williams. Of course, he has a lot of characteristic traits that span over all decades but I think that we can clearly say that he took a development as well.

I wouldn't say that his development is exclusive due to the development in the film industry but he also developed on a personal musical level. I know that a lot of people say that the 70s/80s Williams was the best Williams and I can see where they are coming from. His music from these decades has an overwhelming creative force and myriad of brilliant ideas. They also seem to be more edgy, rough and unpolished which I can see as an attractive feature. But I would say that the late 80s onwards showed a considerable amount of refinement in his general body of work. It feels like his early 80s voice was more like presenting his musical idea quite clearly and in your face. It is fascinating to see how "empty" some of the score sheets of the first Star Wars Trilogy look like. Ideas are presented in a punchy straight forward approach without much embellishment. In the 90s, he got way more obsessed with textural details sometimes obviously investing a lot of work into minor details just to get them right. His work became more multi layered and you could find rather hidden details almost everywhere. This of course made his music often less "in your face" than his earlier work, but it still feels more mature to me.

One of the sentences that kept stuck in my head from a seasoned BBC composer/orchestrator was when he told 22 year old me "I'm 60 now and have been writing music for my entire life, but the great thing about music is that you never stop learning and refining your craft."

In this regard, I feel it is a natural process to change one's compositional voice over time and refine one's craft. There were composers in history who drastically changed their way of writing over their life time (e.g. Schönberg) but even the composers who kept a relatively steady musical language over the span of their life did change. I think a lot has to do with a personal refinement of one's craft and striving to improve but there might also be a part where the personal development of one's own character has influence on one's music, and I think that even applies for composers who write for the media.

After all, I think every composer is quite aware of how their music changes over time and I smile at my old music now that at the time I thought was really edgy. But I wouldn't blame that all on lack of experience but also in some occasions on  the fact that I had a different mindset on things back then.