Why Compose?

“Why compose music? Why perform music? Why listen to music? The obvious answers are, respectively, money, money, and pleasure.”

Tim Blanning (Ch. 2, P.1)

In a world where it seems that every musical possibility and avenue has already been explored (at least broadly), and where there aren’t enough fingers and toes in a whole concert hall to count the number of exceptional works of music that exist, why do composers insist on persisting?

This is, of course, a gross oversimplification, but it must often be how it seems for those within a musical paradigm looking out at the world. Tchaikovsky, for example, wrote that:

“Mozart is the highest, the culminating point that beauty has attained in the sphere of music” while Debussy thought that “…if we look at the works of J.S. Bach — a benevolent god to which all musicians should offer a prayer to defend themselves against mediocrity — on each page we discover things which we thought were born only yesterday, from delightful arabesques to an overflowing of religious feeling greater than anything we have since discovered. And in his works we will search in vain for anything the least lacking in good taste.”

It is therefore perhaps part of the human condition that we look back and feel an impossible measuring stick against which to compare our work. It seems that no person will, or indeed should surpass Mozart’s genius, or indeed any of the grandfathers of classical music. Today, it is no more, nor less, true to say that everything has been done than it was for Debussy to says that everything there was to be found could be found in Bach’s music.

Perhaps it seems more true today, for when we look back we cannot help but think it must have been different for those earlier composers when so much less musical diversity existed, that so many paths remained open and un-tread before them. We have the proof of this to justify our perspective, there was no Primitivism, Modernism, Timbralism, Spectralism, Minimalism, Complexity, New Complexity, Postmodernism… this list goes on.

However, this is almost surely how looking back will always feel, because it will always appear that everything has been done, until you stumble upon a piece of the puzzle that doesn’t not belong. However, if we’re looking backwards, or thinking that everything has been done, when we find that piece that doesn’t fit, we don’t see it as something new and go looking for the other pieces, we set it aside and assume it is a failure because it doesn’t fit the existing context.

This is the problem of all new ideas and concepts, there will be nothing in existence that one can use to measure its validity by. For example, if I were the inventor of the train, and I measured it compared to the existing transportation methods of the time like the horse and carriage, I might deem that is is cumbersome, expensive to construct, inflexible in its availability and destination, loud, and dangerous. However, these failures are a consequence of its strengths. The train was cumbersome as a consequence of being able to move far greater cargo, it was inflexible in its destination as a consequence of being able to travel there much more rapidly.

Personally, I do not believe that everything that can be done has been done, because it is a part of the human mind to imagine new ways of doing things, whether it is a new way to build a spear, to move between two locations, or to write music. If we orientate ourselves in this direction, and are open to it, the new will emerge.

The question nonetheless remains: why compose? While such a question seems on the surface very simple, the more one attempts to unpack it, the more complex and elusive becomes the answer. As a composer myself, I have often considered William Blake’s often quoted phrase “The fool who persists in his folly will become wise” somewhat of a personal answer, thinking perhaps if I continue to do this long enough, I will come to know more tangibly why it is so important, other that feeling in my gut that says simply “Because”.

As Blanning observes, money is one reason to compose. If you are good at it and there is a market for it, then such an answer is possibly enough. However, in the Classical or Art streams of musical composition, very few composers I am aware of are able to make their entire income from writing music. Most supplement their careers with multiple income streams and in particular with teaching at a university or school. One might make the argument that their compositional skill is what led to a teaching post and to being paid, however circuitously, for being a composer. This line of argument, however, is far too reductive for my liking, and few people I know of have pursued composition through university studies with this outcome as their primary aspiration.

Another possible answer, once fortune is ruled out, is fame. Such a pursuit would, however, be just as futile in the ‘arts industry’ as the pursuit of wealth. Classical music is, after all, a niche, and your personal flavour of contemporary classical music is likely a niche within a niche within a niche, within the already small listenership that is Classical music. Certainly, one can be well known and respected within one’s community, and I imagine that all composers necessarily strive for such a status as it is likely required in order to secure commissions, opportunities and funding. However, I likewise think this can be ruled out as a plausible reason for pursuing composition as an artistic medium in and of itself.

It’s true that for some composers, the answer to this question is simple. Their purpose is to create new knowledge, to explore and invent new ways of creating music. The music is not so much a means of communication as it is the end point of a line of explorations or the expression of an abstract concept. While easy to justify, this rational-conceptual motivation for creating music is only one of the many reasons that composers create music.

Part of the problem with the initial question is that there are other questions underpinning it, such as: what is the purpose and value of music generally and what is the value of contemporary classical music specifically? To ask after why people listen to music, or similarly, why people might perform or compose music, might really be to ask after the fundamental nature of our species, and is a question that, even after many years of research and investigation, can really only be answered ‘because’. Music can be entertainment, an enjoyable activity to participate in, a part of a ritual, a means to pursue the spiritual, a way to help people with trauma, and many other things, and yet the question ‘why music?’ remains constant.

As Oliver Sack’s points out in Musicophilia, music “…lacks images, symbols, the stuff of language. It has no power of representation. It has no necessary relation to the world” (Preface) and yet virtually every aspect of our lives are pervaded by it, today more than ever before. It would be rare for an average person to make it through a single day without some sort of exposure to music. It fills our shopping centres, pubs, cafes and restaurants, it lingers in the background of our films and television programs, and it accompanies us as we go from place to place in our cars, taxis and public transport. Often, when music isn’t present, we go out of our way to add it, carrying electronic devices — ipods, mp3 players, phones, tablets and computers — so that we never have to be without music.

Oliver Sack’s uses Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End to discuss the phenomenon of music from an outside perspective. In Clarke’s novel, a music-less species of aliens come to earth and are unable to truly understand why humans would make and enjoy music to the extent that they do. Yet, oddly, this is also often our own perspective as we humans likewise do not fully understand why we make and enjoy music the way that we do.

Steven Pinker famously suggested that “music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties” (534) and more recent research (2011) has confirmed this to some extent, showing that “[Music] can arouse feelings of euphoria and craving…” (Salimpoor et al). However, music does not simply result in pleasure, but has a host of other startling effects as well. “The evidence for the beneficial effects of music on reward, motivation, pleasure, stress, arousal, immunity, and social affiliation is mounting” writes Chanda and Levitin (189) in an article on neurochemistry and music in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science. For example, music makes us better thinkers, improving how we deal with challenging choices and life events. Research by Masataka and Perlovsky explored music’s interaction with the Stoop effect — the effect of interference in the reaction time to a task — and concluded that “the Stroop effect results in cognitive interference as expected, and our hypotheses were confirmed: consonant music helps to overcome cognitive interference…” (‘Results’).

Music’s effect only gets increasingly interesting, however, as Perlovsky also tested the effect of music upon cognitive dissonance.

“Cognitive dissonance (CD) is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting elements of knowledge. It is well known that this discomfort is usually resolved by devaluing and discarding a conflicting piece of knowledge (Festinger, 1957; Cooper, 2007; Harmon-Jones et al, 2009). In a classical CD experiment (Aronson & Carlsmith, 1963) children devalued a toy if they were told that they couldn’t play with it. This experiment has been reproduced thousands of times with both children and adults (Cooper, 2007) in various situations, confirming CD theory. The desire ‘to have’ contradicts the inability ‘to attain’; this CD is resolved by discarding the contradiction. […] However, when the above experiment was reproduced with music playing in the background the toy was not devalued (Masataka & Perlovsky, 2012)” (Perlovsky 4).

The implications of this are significant. Music allows humans to continue striving and progressing, to continue to pursue and value things even when they are (initially perceived as) unobtainable. In this way, music is perhaps, at its most fundamental, hope distilled into something tangible that can be shared. It’s the promise that Aesop’s fabled fox might actually, in the end, capture the grape and discover it as sweet as first imagined. In existential terms, music is the antidote to ressentiment.

In reading about such research, I find myself thinking of famed physicist, Albert Einstein, who was himself also a fair violinist. Einstein remarked that “Music does not influence research work, but both are nourished by the same sort of longing, and they complement each other in the satisfaction they offer” (cited in Dukas and Hoffman 78), and yet, after reading Perlovsky’s research, I can not help but wonder if it wasn’t music that helped Einstein to keep pushing at the boundaries of Newtonian physics, to keep grasping after a better way to understand light, time, space and matter even after it initial alluded him? While such questions are unanswerable, we know that music was important to Einstein who nonetheless said “I get most joy in life out of music”, and that research now suggests that it allows one to think more clearly in the face of interference, and to overcome cognitive dissonance. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Music also plays a strong role in our social bonding, fostering what Koelsch refers to as the “seven Cs”: contact, cognition, co-pathy, communication, co-ordination, co-operation and cohesion.

Many of these aspects of music, however, while justifying the existence of the phenomenon of music, do not truly answer the question, why compose? Especially when many of these positive qualities can be obtained from listening to or performing a two century old work of Mozart. These explanations justify the reason why people engage in the general activity of music, but not why they would create new music, nor why they would specifically create contemporary ‘classical’ music.

When a composer is asked about this, a typical response is to point to the naturalistic aspects of nature. Why do birds fly? Why do fish swim? Why do lungs breathe and hearts beat? Because it is in their nature. Some, like Stravinsky, describe the activity as something fundamental and important: “For me as a creative musician, composition is a daily function that I feel compelled to discharge. I compose because I am made for that an cannot to otherwise…” (Stravinsky, qtd. in Gardener). Others, like Ned Rorem, however, emphasises a need that the act of composing satisfies: “Why do I compose? […] I compose for my own necessity, because no one else makes quite the sound I wish to hear”(Rorem 451). Still others, like Mahler have instead suggested that “If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.”

Is it the activity of composing that is fundamental, or is it the result and consequence of composition, the expression, or the rendering of sounds one wishes to hear? Susanne Langer seems to agree with Mahler that”music can reveal the nature of feelings with a detail and truth that language cannot approach” (191) so one might argue that it is the expression of those otherwise inexpressible feelings that drives composers to compose. Along these lines, Kaschub and Smith write that “Children compose music to make sense of their feelings and experiences… the understandings revealed in their music are not literal, but experiential, personal, and powerful…” and they believe that, for children, inventing music “…plays a crucial role in the growth of both musician and person. It contributes to the development of self in unique and varied ways” (25–26). The need for self-expression is an undeniable part of the human psyche, so perhaps music serves just as significantly for adult composers as children, the need to ‘make sense of their feelings and experiences’. However, music and its impetus, once again, cannot be so simply defined, with many artists talking about something that is transcendent of personal expression.

Blacking, for example, describes a spiritual dimension to the act of composing: “[Composers] refer to states in which people become keenly aware of the true nature of their being, of the “other self” within themselves and other human beings, and of their relationship with the world around them” (38). Blacking goes on to suggest that the way that music alters our perception of time grants us “…complete absorption in the ‘Timeless Now of the Divine Spirit’, the loss of self in Being” (38).

Yet further possibilities comes from philosophy. Nietzsche wrote that “We possess art lest we perish of the truth” but other philosophers have, perhaps more fundamentally, suggested that “To be is to create” (Hartshorne 272). Such an idea of the inextricable link between being and creating, between reality and process, was something extensively explored by English mathematician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, who posited that “Creativity… is the ultimate notion of the highest generality at the base of actuality” (Whitehead 31). While Whitehead spoke little about the arts directly, his conception of God in the process of reality, led him to suggest that “The work of art is a message from the Unseen. It unlooses depths of feeling from behind the frontier where precision of consciousness fails” (AI 349).

Thus far, however, we have concerned ourselves principally with philosophies and ideas which are of Western origins. Exploring Eastern philosophy, however, leads us interestingly back to a similar naturalistic (or mystical) explanation of the role of the artist. Of these alternate perspective, I find the Zen religio-philosophy and the resulting aesthetics that arise from it, to be a deep source of meaning, expressions of which can be readily seen in many Japanese art forms. What is often a point of distinction between the arts of Japan (and other Eastern cultures) and those of the Western ‘canon’ is the emphasis on process rather than purely the resulting product. According to Juniper, in traditional Japanese art forms, the “role of the artists is that of a medium rather than an individual… it is the supreme achievement of an artist to reach the levels where conscious effort and thought are abandoned to the dictums of the unforeseen forces that guide out lives” (72). In this way, much of the aesthetic pursuits of traditional Japanese artists are reflections of a spiritual pursuit, not of construction of an artwork in and of itself. Also different from Western aesthetic ideals, imperfection and impermanence play important roles in Japanese aesthetics. For example, Wabi Sabi art is “rooted firmly in Zen thought… [Wabi Sabi art] uses the evanescence of life to convey the sense of melancholic beauty that such an understanding brings” (Juniper 8).

In such Eastern aesthetics, the art work is a projection of the artists understanding of reality, thought to be visible even in a single brush stoke (as, for example, with the drawing of Enso), while the work product itself often serves to direct one toward a certain fundamental understanding of the world as spiritually imbued and constantly in flux.

Yet, thrice I ask: “why compose?” And thrice again I yet answer: “because…because…because…”. Is it for fame or fortune? Probably not, but as all others do, artists need food to eat, a place to sleep, and space in which to work, so while not a primary aim, being paid and recognised for their work is as necessary as it is uninspiring. Is it for music’s ability to express the otherwise inexpressible qualities of experience that one composes? This is perhaps closer to the truth, although what a composer is expressing might vary from a spiritual experience to an intellectual concept of geometry, or a strongly felt emotion.

An answer that, if nothing else, is at least a sufficiently poetic and elegant explanation that I am content to claim it for my own, comes from Karl Paulnak’s 2014 opening address at the Boston Conservatory of Music:

“The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us.”

I personally suggest that composers are cartographers of these inner worlds, measuring and mapping out pieces of it. In this way, art becomes a mirror held up to our mind and consciousness so that we can see what they look like and explore a deeper mystery. As in Eastern mysticism, that mystery is the light behind all things, shining forth, from a flower as much as from a human. Artists stare into that light until they go blind with it; they clutch at it with their hands until they go numb with it; they focus their hearing on it until it deafens them to it; and when all their senses seem to be washed away by it, they realise that their senses never were, and that they themselves are what they were fumbling for. And in a moment of surrender that inevitably follows, they are moved — as the whole universe moves, one enormous creative process — to play with creation in their small way. They put paint to canvas just so, or write words that flow with a perfect, rolling canter: thus; Or, if they’re a composer, they hear or feel the music, and know how it must be written down.

For a moment, they burn with it, the urge to create fiery in their bellies, their breathing rapid, their pulse quick, for they have danced with the universe itself, and now, for this brief moment, it twirls for them. Them! Then it passes, and in the ashes of their fierce communion, is their child, its life pure and vital and true, immaculately conceived for there was only ever them. Or, perhaps, it is better say that there was never them, just, The Way.

Through music, composers take the invisible, internal, hidden objects of our hearts, minds and souls, and rework them into constellations that might unlock inside someone else a truth, a feeling, or a closed door that, once opened, is transformative in a hundred subtle ways. They feel the pulse of the universe, not all the time, but for moments, and from the formless they create something that has a form. It is, perhaps, an everyday miracle, but its is nonetheless profound. It is the ultimate alchemy, they have transformed thought itself into gold.

However, in addition to the composer (and all artists) as the cartographer of our hidden places, perhaps they are also seers, sensitive enough to at some level anticipate the shape of tomorrow’s world, to feel the hope or the fear, the need for complexity, simplicity, intimacy or separation, and to explore and write the music that tomorrow’s people will need.

There is one final aspect that must be considered here, namely the role of the composer/artist as a beacon for society and a barometer for social and cultural health. When artists are seen as common place, when all people are free to engage in a life of dancing with the metaphysical and playing with the stuff of creation itself, of bringing the formless into form — then we can say that we have created a world of true prosperity and freedom for all. However, when a culture sees artists as either special or a burden, as people who have refused to, as they properly should, conform to societal expectations for them to live and work in particular ways, then we can say quite surely that society has failed its people. In such times, the society that was supposed to, through communal agreement and will, protect, uplift and set people free has instead given them the safety and comfort of a prison, offering protection and by the act of imprisonment. The artist is, in this way, a radical who expose this protection for the falsehood it is, escapes it as best they are able, and burning bright and fierce, demonstrates the freedom that should be available to all.

Above I have outlined in the lightest of pencil upon tracing paper, the shape of an answer to the question ‘why composer?’. However, it is not the answer. That answer is both too large, too intricate, too personal and too universal to be easily articulated. It is for all of the reasons mentioned here, and it is something else too.

It is…

“Because… Because… Because…”

Citations

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Perlovsky, Leonid. “Cognitive Function, Origin, and Evolution of Musical Emotions.” Musicae Scientiae 16.2 (2012): 185–99.

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Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). In a concise survey of the field, “Evolutionary Psychology: A New Paradigm for Psychological Science,” Psychological Inquiry 6 (1995).

Stefan Koelsch. “Brain Correlates of Music-evoked Emotions.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 15.3 (2014): 170–80

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