It’s always been difficult for me to understand precisely how anyone is able to teach another individual the creative act of music composition. Though I’ve been very lucky to study with a number of exceptional composers, I’ve nonetheless never stopped wondering at how anyone could be so insightful regarding the artistic work and unique journey of another person. Consequently, I am not really sure how I would teach music composition were I ever asked to do so. Maybe I would just try to share a few fundamental principals that I’ve collected so far and that I continue to find useful. To that end, following would probably be the first ten from an ongoing and perpetually imperfect list of things I think I've learned about the creative act of writing music so far:
1) Do whatever you want to do that you’re most frightened to do.
2) Anything can be elegant.
3) Commit to the principal of Kaizen: a continual, incremental improvement.
4) Find your own process, perfect it, and then remain faithful to it. The process is the ritual and consistency of process, not local quantity, is the key to long-term progress and truly significant results.
5) Move beyond the need for external validation toward your creative work, particularly if you harbor intentions of accomplishing anything that is in any way actually new.
6) Strive to be utterly honest and brutally critical with yourself. No one else can critique your work in the way you can. Alternately, if you let yourself off the hook then no one will be there to hold you completely accountable and the work will suffer. You are the only real standard as well as the only real enforcer by which the standard is maintained.
7) Take all the time necessary to get this one moment absolutely right before you move on. Once it’s perfect, it’s perfect forever.
8) Anything that the creator experiences can serve to inform the artistic product. Nothing remains off limits or beyond the perimeter.
9) Imagine the body of work that you want to be proud of twenty years from now and get started on it immediately.
10) Cut, cut, cut away. Nothing is sacred but the very end product.
