# What drives your style?



## Stirling (Nov 18, 2015)

list a couple of major influences, and if possible what style of music to you leap off into the void?


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## Guest (Dec 18, 2015)

Deleted post...


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## Stirling (Nov 18, 2015)

so, the first. first of all I had a serious stroke, so I may not ever compose again, but that is life. when I did compose I divided things in to eras, based largely on the harmonics that the era used. thus I was contemporary, but leaned towards using a great deal of the "old" effects. this did not mean that it was old, but it had a patina from years gone by. the major influences on my work would be Bach, Beethoven, Mendelsson, Berlioz, Mahler, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Copeland, Adams.

I tend to work in chamber genres, such as the string quartet and piano trio, partially because the sound is rich enough but not to rich, every instrument getting its due ( 12 string quartets, eight piano trios) and generally takes me at least a year to finish a piece; with certain exceptions ( the wind quintet was finished in sixth days). this again is an intentional part, because the last movement is either a summary of what came before, or a summation standing behind the other movements.

Thus I use variants of fugue, theme and variations and so on, but with my own interpretation of them.

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B38Mh8TG91rRNk81bzVIMUstQms&usp=sharing

what drives you in your work? please share with us what drives your style.


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## Stirling (Nov 18, 2015)

dogen said:


> Some of the posters in this very forum, that seem to have no regard for my finances.
> 
> Microtonal, spectralist...


 influences? does length or number of voices come into the picture?


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## Truckload (Feb 15, 2012)

I have composed many things over the years. I composed many pieces while in college in the 1970's, primarily emphasizing quartel harmony. Obviously that had no future. I wrote 12 or 15 light pieces in the manner of Henri Mancini and Herb Alpert for my own amusement over the years. No one every performed any of those. I did numerous arrangements and original songs for church over the years, perhaps dozens, perhaps a hundred, hard to remember. All were performed, all were well received, but none will ever be heard again. Now that virtual instruments are so good I am trying my hand at writing for orchestra in a late romantic style. What all of these efforts have in common is that I have enjoyed the process of composition, and by learning not to take myself seriously, I have had fun with it.


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## Crudblud (Dec 29, 2011)

I find it hard to answer questions like this. In a very real sense, everything I hear, whether I like it or dislike it, influences me, because I'm adding something to the sum total of my musical experience and that addition is irrevocable, what I learned from this piece or that song stays with me, even if I forget the title or the composer. I would find it hard to believe someone who claimed that not to be the case for them.

I write music for computer rendering, and that is actually my choice, I don't secretly wish I could be writing for major orchestras or whatever. In my music I like to take full advantage of the fact that I am writing for the computer, much of my work is littered with passages that would not be possible for humans to play, and I construct a lot of effects that would be difficult to pull off in performance as well. I favour small instrumentations for a few different reasons, but the main one is that I find them simpler to handle and simpler to write cleanly. Also, given that the computer can fill the roles of multiple performers with a single instrument, I can get a bigger sound and density out of them than would be possible with actual acoustic instruments, with this approach an orchestra-sized group would simply be overkill. So I guess my "tradition" is machine music, examples of this include composers like Luigi Russolo (_The Art of Noises_), Conlon Nancarrow (_Studies for Player Piano_), and Frank Zappa (_Civilization Phaze III_*).

If you're just asking me what music I like and would consider inspirational in some way, that's easier to answer, at least in an unordered list. I like Frank Zappa, Gustav Mahler, Igor Stravinsky, Maurice Ravel, Olivier Messiaen, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Domenico Scarlatti, Glenn Miller, Son House, Van **** Parks, Captain Beefheart, MX-80 Sound, Albert Ayler, Alexander Scriabin, Iannis Xenakis, Eric Dolphy, J.B. Lenoir, John Hammond Jr., Rudimentary Peni, John Cage, Robert Ashley, Morton Feldman, Alvin Lucier, Coil, Kazumoto Endo, Balinese gamelan, Japanese gagaku, Korean traditional music, Thai piphat/cherd nawk, Georgian vocal polyphony, Caroliner, The Residents, Fats Waller, The Andrews Sisters, Edgard Varèse, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Franz Schubert, Anton Bruckner, Howlin' Wolf, Guitar Slim, Hank Williams, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Jean Sibelius, Antonio de Cabezon, Henry Purcell, Atheist, Bobby Joe Ebola & The Children MacNuggits, Ludwig van Beethoven, Butthole Surfers, Elliott Carter, Ella Fitzgerald, Claude Vivier, George Gershwin, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Conlon Nancarrow, Django Reinhardt, and more besides that I'm unable to think of off the top of my head right now.

*this is really the piece that brought me to realise ─ although I had been composing with the computer for some time prior ─ the computer's potential and legitimacy as a musical instrument and/or performer.


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