I had a really nice lesson today. I arrived with 3 doodle-things to my teacher's house and we spent I think more time than what was initially planned discussing them. I must say it was MUCH more than I expected, but it was amazing since I got very interesting insights on how to deal with musical material. I will make a sort of list with them in any order to be more organized.
- Inner silence: It is very important to hear yourself, to be attentive of the ideas that come into your mind. Listen to them carefully and then try as hard as you can to write them as precisely as possible. It doesn't matter if this process takes months and thousands of sketches, the aim should always be to write what you imagined and develop it.
- Intuition v/s systems: I relate very much to this. There has to be a balance between inspiration and work, not all the ideas come naturally, and in general inspiration is not constant, it comes and goes. Personally, I always think that it is best to begin with an intuitive musical idea and then systematically develop it (systematically not necessarily meaning to develop it according to mathematical formulas but to work with it in a more methodical way than just sitting down and writing whatever comes to mind).
- Analyzing other composers' works, especially the ones you like most: When you see how others before you dealt with the same problems you are dealing with now, you can always get ideas. For example, now with my vocal piece my teacher recommended that I should listen to some Romantic lieder and chamber music, as well as analyzing some Messiaen, for this could make me realize how other composers dealt with ideas of rhythm, accompaniment, instrumentation, harmony, melody, etc.
- Combining scales to obtain more interesting harmonic material: This is already more specific, but the idea comes from the fact that I wanted to use an octatonic scale for the harmonies in the first part of my piece, which ended up being really dull and boring. My teacher suggested to superimpose or combine it with different scales, similar to what Messiaen did in some of his works, to give more interest to the harmonies.
- Simple structures: Well, this is actually not something we discussed today with my teacher, it's rather something Magnus Lindberg said in a masterclass I attended (as audience) here in The Hague at the Dr. Anton Philipszaal. He said something along the lines of: crazy music should have a very simple form. His music in general has really simple form, which I think is a really positive aspect of it, since it is much easier for the composer to manage very complex harmonic, melodic and rhythmic ideas (among others) and it is easier for the audience to process the music. Everybody wins. I quite liked his pieces, especially Seht die Sonne, of which he showed us some fragments.
So, I'm really happy because I believe I have more ideas now, and much more to think about, which is always great. I leave you today with some Messiaen, I listened to this piece 2 times in a row just now, I'm getting a little bit obsessed by Messiaen:
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