# Changing styles?



## Manok (Aug 29, 2011)

I've been considering changing styles, and I was wondering how composers who have in the past, have done so?


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

What style are you interested in changing to?


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## Manok (Aug 29, 2011)

It's not so much changing styles as eliminating the more modern rockish elements from my music.


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

Hmm well I think usually when a composer changes styles they just get interested in something else other than what they are currently doing.


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## Igneous01 (Jan 27, 2011)

From my experience, you can never truly eliminate certain stylistic elements from your compositions. It remains in your subconscious and so sometimes you dont even realize you wrote 60 bars of some rock rhythm. 

I think what you need to do is to listen to some different types of music, maybe eastern music so that the styles are much more diversified, find music you like thats different from the normal, and just experiment with the ways the music was written. Then you slowly incorporate these things into your own compositions.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Some composers did do a complete about face, but it's rare as far as I know. 

Eg. Harry Partch was one of them, he destroyed all of his compositions for conventional instruments and then devised his own microtonal scale and invented new instruments to play them.

I think Henri Dutilleux also destroyed almost all his early output, saying it was too much like Ravel & Debussy, etc., & then moved in new directions, forging his own style. Alan Hovhaness did a similar thing.

But not all composers did that kind of "blank slate" thing, it's rare as far as I know, but it does take some courage and nerve to totally destroy what you've done up until a point in time, as if it never existed, and kind of start from scratch totally...


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

Sid James said:


> Some composers did do a complete about face, but it's rare as far as I know.
> 
> Eg. Harry Partch was one of them, he destroyed all of his compositions for conventional instruments and then devised his own microtonal scale and invented new instruments to play them.
> 
> ...


As a composer myself, I would never want to destroy what I did beforehand, no matter how bad I thought it was. It is always a nice reminder of where I came from, or how far I have come in your musical development and such. When I was 14 I wrote my first attempt at a string quartet, looking back on it, it is not that good. But even if my first string quartet was quite derivative and bland and a little silly, I think it is still fun to look back at it now and again.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

violadude said:


> As a composer myself, I would never want to destroy what I did beforehand, no matter how bad I thought it was...I think it is still fun to look back at it now and again.


& reflecting on that, us listeners as well as scholars (or anyone interested in classical music), are also interested in where a composer came from, so to speak. A compromise is not publishing it but just putting it in the archives for scholars or whoever to pore over & garner from it what they can, for what it's worth, etc. There's a lot of stuff out there that composers chose not to publish, and at least it has the possibility of coming to light & being played, unlike things that ended up being destroyed...


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