The Good Musician

Why Composing Great Music Is So Hard

by Arjun Muralidharan on October 24th, 2007

Photography by spazzbat.

Do you know how to compose great music?

Composing, or creating music has always been something I found hardest. I was recently asked why composing isn’t my forte, and it made me think.

Basically, if you can attach a few sounds to each other in a sequence, you’ve got a composition.

So composing is easy, right? Well, the problem is that it might be great for you, but let’s be honest: You want other people to like your music as well.

The first and easiest stage of composing would be simple songwriting. Three chords, a simple melody everyone can sing along, and you’re practically set up.

The next step is orchestration. Which instruments do I need? Which instrument plays what? To answer this question, you need to understand the function of an instrument, it’s context within a band or orchestra, and just need to know “what works”. To know that, experience is key - unless you’ve played a thousand pieces over and over, you won’t really have a clear idea of what works.

Phew. Seems hard.

You see, even bands like Green Day, whose music is technically “simple”, have practiced and played thousands of pieces from various genres. Unless you know all old things, you can’t develop something really new.

And that’s my problem. I can’t really get creative, or be satisfied with what I have written because I know that it’s probably been done before or I just don’t like it myself - which leads us to step 3: Implementation of Theory.

To stick with our example of Green Day, even Billie Joe Armstrong probably has a quite complex understanding of music theory. While playing and finding out what “works” and what not is important, understanding what technically can or cannot work is the other.

There are chords that, in theory, will sound strange when played seuqentially. There are notes that can’t be played in a happy song. There are instruments that technically can’t play the chords or notes you’ve written.

So to make my long rant short, composing music is a two-way dilemma: It’s possible to compose, but the composer himself can never be happy with what he’s done, unless he continues to develop a deep knowledge about music itself. Theory first, practice later.

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POSTED IN: Music Theory