# Composers and their Influences



## SottoVoce (Jul 29, 2011)

In any art, influences are often not chosen (TS Eliot, while professing to continue the style of Baudelaire and Dante, was actually much more in tune with Whitman and Tennyson, poets he both hated untill late in his life). In composing a piece, at least for me, the models that I use in a composition come more by indirect association by any conscious effort to emulate. Often, it also seems that my favorite composers aren't even the ones I want to write like. So, influences are often a complex factor, maybe not even open to conscious thought; but one could try to flesh them out. What composers do you think that have influenced you the most, that you would either like to, or do inescapably, write in the vein of? 


For me, for example, there is little music I love after 1945 more than Babbitt and Carter, but I can never see myself writing in the same tune as them. The biggest influence for me, the one I think I would like to write most like, is Thomas Ades, a composer who I admire very much and who is close enough in time so it is possible to be influenced even in terms of the vocabulary that he uses. In a more distant line, Berg, Brahms, Schumann, and Faure seem to be close to my heart in terms of emulation.


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