# Your Temperament as a Composer



## SottoVoce (Jul 29, 2011)

We all know the wide variety of temperaments amongst the great composers when it comes to their craft; on one scale, the Beethovens and Weberns work long and laboriously and the other are the Mozarts and Schuberts that write music with little effort and in quick pace. Both sides, of course, produce great music, but I think it's undecided whether it has any real effect on the music at all.

My temperament as a composer turns out to be unfortunately the self-deprecating, unsure and laborious worker; I have been working on one piece, for example, for close to a year and have never had more than 20 minutes working where the thought of wiping it away didn't please me. The past pieces I've written I've felt the same, but always when I came back to them after a couple of weeks, I was much more lenient on criticism. Also, I often have sessions where I don't write anything on the paper, and thoughts come to me slowly and erasable.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

I've experienced bits of both. When I have an idea and find a way to work it out, I can put quite a bit down at once, and then the next time I can look for continuations for an hour, two hours, and find I can't do anything at all.


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## lupinix (Jan 9, 2014)

Yeah I know what you mean, I usually can't hear my music from the moment it is really finished until at least months later and somtimes more than a year. Funny enough I do enjoy many of my far less experienced pieces from 3 years ago but I can't listen to something I finished in november, and also 3 years ago I couldn't listen to those pieces I'd just made.s 

As for the kind of temperament, I'm the chaotic one I guess, I can't work on one piece at one time, I am usually busy a lot of unfinished ideas, which I do have to finish eventually because they have a personal meaning to me. There is a string quartet I started almost two years ago and still working on it sometimes, while I have completed a lot of pieces started this schoolyear. Sometimes I even finish a (small) piece in less than a day, if you don't count specifying little notation things in the score and that kind of things which usualy take 2 seconds.

also I kindoff have three kinds of musical "periods": times when I am just working at ideas from earlier, and there seem enough to always have a piece of the feeling or thought I want to express at a moment, mostly times when my life is more calm and everything isn't too bad, times when I have a lot ideas but can't really work them out into pieces, usually just after something hard has happened, and finally those times I really have a kind of "composersblock", mostly those times begin with a burst of new ideas which are still too fresh and painfull to do something with apart from improvising a bit, while there are already too many unfinished things to oversee, and I feel very pressured and insecure (for instance because of the thought I have to present something to my teacher next lesson) and finally I seem not being able to express myself in anything at all, which of course is only more depression which makes it harder to start composing again and thats why those periods seem to never end 

unfortunately im in the last kind of period now but am trying to pick it up the last few days


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

I don't think this has to do with any composer's fundamental temperament or personality ticks. It reads like a handful of 'ways we know they worked,' because that is how readily, or not, music came to them.

There are some extremes, like the melodramatically phrased statement of Manuel de Falla in a letter sent to a friend -- about agonizing over a few notes or a harmony in a measure, or what comes next, for days on end it seems. 

Some are like that: some are extremely self-deprecating and self-doubting (Bruckner); 

some work very hard and it is for them like chiseling bits off a block of marble to end up with materials that yield before they can continue, let alone finish a piece (Beethoven, though look at the number of works over a lifetime... meaning these agonies do not equate with an enormous amount of time or delay in producing); 
and some write like others need to micturate upon waking each morning (the prolifics, the Bachs, Telemans, Vivaldis, Mozarts, Schuberts, Milhauds, etc. -- of varying degrees of quality but all the while consistently producing quantity, and working on a near daily basis.)

So how much of that is really individual "temperament" vs. just "what they have to work with?"

I wouldn't want to dare to venture a guess 

P.s. and about or on myself? You gotta be kidding if you think I'm telling more than I may have already let out of the bag here or there


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## Crudblud (Dec 29, 2011)

On the whole I think I lean towards cautious and meticulous, though I can see why it wouldn't seem that way in some of my work, which probably appears quite nonsensical to a lot of people. The process of composition is an interactive one for me, I am nominally in control but the music feeds back to me as I write it, and in many ways it is just as influential over my mood as I am over its rhythms, so often my temperament is at various points along a sliding scale depending on how quickly I can understand the musical information I am working with. It's a pretty frequent occurrence that I will go over the same part hundreds of times before I am sure of it, and then I might do it again later on as new material offers a second opinion. In the case of one piece it took me some three years to realise I had finished it, I kept going back to it every so often without progress, then one day it suddenly occurred to me that I couldn't make progress because I had already reached the end. There are many exceptions to what I have just said, but cautious, methodical, slow, meticulous, these are definitely the right words for my usual working experience.

Off-topic: I'm always glad to see this kind of thread around here, I think we could do with having them more regularly. It's good to see so many people sharing their music and all, but too often we neglect to share experiences of and ideas on composition in general, which I think is just as important for this somewhat less popular sub-community as any of the work posted here. When all people do is post new pieces (something I am definitely guilty of) it can start to seem like a free advertising sub-forum, but when we actually come and talk about composing this place really feels like a community.


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## Aramis (Mar 1, 2009)

I reject the idea of making effort to do my best after 5-10 bars, go like "whatever" and my priority is to finish as soon as possible to finally have it off me and everything I have ever composed is result of sitting at piano for 10-15 minutes each time with large (often days, not hours) gaps of not-doing in-between.

What is this temperament called

Maybe PetrB can come out with some accurate word for it that would pointedly expose me as wanna-be


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## lupinix (Jan 9, 2014)

Crudblud said:


> Off-topic: I'm always glad to see this kind of thread around here, I think we could do with having them more regularly. It's good to see so many people sharing their music and all, but too often we neglect to share experiences of and ideas on composition in general, which I think is just as important for this somewhat less popular sub-community as any of the work posted here. When all people do is post new pieces (something I am definitely guilty of) it can start to seem like a free advertising sub-forum, but when we actually come and talk about composing this place really feels like a community.


I agree
also to me composing is also rather like an experience of the music than an action


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## Matsps (Jan 13, 2014)

Sometimes I improvise an entire piece on the spot and other times it will take days or weeks to get something down. I see composing as like throwing dice. You throw the dice and see what you get. If it's good, you can work on it, if not, throw them again. I guess some days, you get a lucky first roll...

Of course, I think you can fix the dice by studying music theory, becoming better on your instrument and exposing yourself to various things in the world (e.g. social situations, nature).


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Aramis said:


> I reject the idea of making effort to do my best after 5-10 bars, go like "whatever" and my priority is to finish as soon as possible to finally have it off me and everything I have ever composed is result of sitting at piano for 10-15 minutes each time with large (often days, not hours) gaps of not-doing in-between.
> 
> What is this temperament called
> 
> Maybe PetrB can come out with some accurate word for it that would pointedly expose me as wanna-be


I do have interest in "wanna do's" though 

First, lets say for all those 'who don't' that some of the very real agonies of composing are very much to the point of import of that glib phrase, "First World Problem." Unlike it is in general life, where very real problems are thrown our way from outside, a composer _gets to choose the problems they want to solve_.

Okeedoh... that outta the way.

I would challenge you to sit through your impatience, your reticence and discomforts. You may not add but a few more notes of those next few measures, if any, but if the idea (and your need to do) are worth any effort at all, sitting there for several hours more actually does something -- you are in attendance of (and consciously concentrating upon) that vague thing you've started which may become "a piece."

Living with it then brings you a familiarity more and more about what it might be, _and what it might not be_. _Knowing what does not belong in a piece is a huge benefit to finding what does belong in it._ Sitting with your short draft, you will get some general sense (via intuition?) of the self-contained logic that lies within that kernel of an idea you drafted vs. imposing something upon it from the outside. Some of this goes better if you hold a belief that even the music plucked from your own imagination is but the tip of an iceberg, an as yet unknown entity with a personality, shape, size and characteristics independent of you as the composer....
*"I firmly believe that compositions have a will of their own, though some people smile at the concept." ~ Einojuhani Rautavaara*

That is why you have to sit with it, patiently, letting what you have in front of you be something you assess in this way: "What is this? "Who is this?" Where does it want to go to be itself?" "How does this speak." "What are its personal aspects which distinguish it from another?" (...just as we assess people, or an infant while guessing its basic temperament... etc.)

I recommend, then, that you sit there, through all the impatience and discomfort, ignore what you think others think, hell, maybe even more importantly what _you_ think, even. You may pen one more note or none in that longer session: when you return to it you may be just as blank as to what to do, but don't be surprised that after that time so spent, the next day or following session that 'something pops out of you,' you would not normally expect. That is because you did spend the time with it and your sub-conscious, while you were either awake or asleep, has been at work on the 'discovery' of what the piece is, and has arrived at some solutions to what were for you a real problem.

Begging your pardon for what may seem to be just so many quasi-mystical and vague statements, but that is, for me and many I have talked with and other composers I have read about, somewhat 'like it goes.'

P.s. A bit of good old fashioned faith is in good order in aiding and abetting the creative crimes you wish to commit -- put in the time, repeatedly, you will actually find it does have effect, exactly as you have directly experienced in practicing an instrument.

Best regards.

P.p.s. Well, I've exposed myself in about an area and in a public arena which I am mostly loathe to do, mainly because I feel it is very private business and that all the above is rarely either of any real interest or use but to "those on the inside."


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## Richannes Wrahms (Jan 6, 2014)

Mahlerian said:


> I've experienced bits of both. When I have an idea and find a way to work it out, I can put quite a bit down at once, and then the next time I can look for continuations for an hour, two hours, and find I can't do anything at all.


It happens to me a lot. I have a terrible perfectionism that regularly makes me destroy the efforts that took me hours of craft simply because "it wasn't good enough". I have many files with scarps, beginnings and sketches of future compositions that I don't even know it they will ever come to fruition.


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## Vasks (Dec 9, 2013)

Temperament? It comes mighty close to just saying how one composes doesn't it?

However, I'd say that my "temperament" is fairly even-keeled. I usually compose for an hour or two each morning after I've done my "current listening". While I am listening to Vasks, Copland or whoever, my mind is analyzing such things as their orchestration, motivic usage, rhythms, etc. Then armed with a second cup of coffee (mmm, I can smell right now my Hazelnut coffee I had today, because it's still right here beside me..LOL) I immerse myself in writing. 

I tend to work on only one piece at a time, but if writers block occurs I switch to another project without hesitation.

Now as to why I say I'm "even-keeled"? Simple, my motto is "They are just notes. There's no reason to feel attached to the first ones I've written down"

So, I throw away many notes I write, but I am firmly of the opinion that it is better to keep putting down as many notes as you can so you get the final double bar. My philosophy is that once you have a double bar everything that was written can be revised. Not many of us write a "perfect" piece, so going back and reworking spots is an important part of my process. By having a complete work I am able see all materials used and figure out how some of that can be utilized to help revise the weak spots.


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