FAQ #

Isn’t composition too rare of a skill for this to be practical? #

Not at all - anyone who plays an instrument can learn composition, which at its heart only requires a solid understanding of melody, harmony and rhythm, all of which you learn by playing and improvising on a Classical instrument. Once you have these three skills, you can generally learn musical form from first principles by watching score videos, reading and playing from sheet music, and even listening to music without visual assistance. Reading books, of course, is always a good idea (especially for learning functional harmony), but it isn’t a replacement for playing and listening to music.

Being able to compose well is often thought of as a rare skill compared to being able to play an instrument because it is - but not for a lack of talent. It’s simply the case that composing has never been nearly as economically lucrative as playing an instrument for the vast, vast majority of people (something that has become even truer in the last century), and skills that lack economic value tend to go unhoned.

That said, improvisation was part and parcel of being an 18th century Classical musician, and anyone who can improvise can compose. The key to good composition, in my opinion, is having people that you know on a personal level to compose for. We aim to bring back this model of interpersonal composition, which has been in decline since the 1700s.

But doesn’t composition take too long? #

Contemporary composition tends to take a while because of its massive orchestration, but I also believe that when writing music from your study, several thousand miles away from the unknown orchestra that may or may not eventually perform your music, Parkinson’s Law tends to apply: That is, “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. We believe that the mindboggling productivity of composers from Vivaldi to Bach to Telemann to Schubert (all of whom had day jobs, no computers, and no lightbulbs) can to a large extent be attributed to the fact that they had tangible, perhaps slightly impatient, musicians to write for, a very different dynamic than the contemporary paradigm of Classical composition which tends to treat musicians as an abstraction used to realize a composer’s vision.

Whilst post-1800s Classical typically embraces the idea of the composer as a visionary who uses musicians to bring his or her vision to life, we fundamentally reject that notion in favor of the idea of composition as a natural byproduct of musicianship, something carried out by musicians to serve their fellow musicians.

That all said, the complexity of formal composition is one of the many reasons we like improvisation - sometimes, creating a novel musical experience requires little more than writing a two bar bassline and instructions!

Why is improvisation important? #

Because:

1. Improvisation is composition off of paper and in real time. It won’t teach you orchestration or voice leading (on a monophonic instrument), but it will teach you the fundamental creative process of composition far more than reading books ever will. We believe that any person who can improvise can efficiently compose great music, and that anyone can learn to improvise. Since musicians composing is fundamental to our goal of liberating musicians, improvisation must also become fundamental to our goal. We recommend practicing improvising a little bit every time you pick up your instrument.

2. Group improvisation is a beautiful way to make music without the relatively time-consuming process of writing sheet music. It’s a wonderful skill that enriches any musician’s musical experience.

Why should we create ephemeral music? #

When you look at some of Bach or Vivaldi’s output, it sometimes makes you wonder - why didn’t they reuse significantly more of their music? Even if you need a cantata or a violin concerto every week, do you really need to write 300 of them? Why not cycle through the old ones from time to time? Better yet, why didn’t Bach just use some of the cantatas that one of his 16 predecessors at the Thomaskirche must have surely left behind? And then there’s their contemporary, Weiss, who wrote 1000 lute pieces, possibly just for himself to play!

In short, all of these composers believed what we believe: New music - that is, music just written - should take precendence over old music by default. Why? Because they viewed composition as a craft more than an art (although it is both), and they intuitively understood that for great, innovative music to be written in the future, it is necessary that composers are given constant opportunities to hone their craft in the present. The contemporary paradigm of Classical music provides, in general, very few opportunities to write music that matters to anyone, which is antithetical to it producing great composers in the future.

Consider the other craft of playing the violin: There is hardly anyone in the world who believes that the existence of millions of great violinists, and an ever-expanding number of great violin recordings, makes it unnecessary or a waste of time to learn the violin, because people respect the time and effort that goes into learning such a difficult instrument, and understand that there’s value in practicing the craft of playing an instrument for its own sake. The value in playing Bach’s Chaconne yet again (when there are already many, many great recordings) is not something that needs to be explained to the average person.

We believe that exactly the same principle applies to composition - it is a great achievement to create a visionary masterpiece, but that cannot be the goal of composition any more than recording a violin concerto can be the goal of playing the violin. The goal of composition is to practice the craft of composition here in the present, and create something for the other musicians that you’re playing with. If the goal is anything else, then what future can there be for Classical composition? Why write anything at all if there will always be something better or more well-regarded from 200 years ago? Why play new music at all? After all, even with the current gaps in Classical repertoire that we aim to fill, sooner or later there will come a time where there is just no need to write new music.

Under the contemporary paradigm of Classical music, where old is as relevant as new, these questions have been definitively answered by composers and musicians: There really isn’t any reason to write and play new music, at least not most of the time. Classical music has, accordingly, stagnated.

But such questions, in our view, are tantamount to asking why someone should learn the violin when someone somewhere has already gotten quite good at the violin and has already released excellent recordings of all of the repertoire they want to play. This would miss the forest for the trees; the only good reason to play the violin is to practice the craft of playing the violin, and the only good reason to compose is to practice the craft of composition.

It should be noted that we do not have any problem with the recording and preservation of newly written music, nor any problem with playing pieces multiple times: We simply believe that music should be written not with lofty goals like changing the world or propelling music forward, but with a simple view toward service of one’s fellow musicians and a love of the craft and art of composition. This is a mindset that almost invariably leads to a large quantity of music being written, most of which, mathematically, cannot possibly be played frequently after first being played.

What about community orchestras? #

In my experience, community orchestra doesn’t work as a paradigm; Either you require auditions and they become inaccessible to the less skilled adult beginners who need to play with other people the most in order to learn and keep their motivation, or you don’t and they become a messy, not-stellar sounding hodgepodge of musicians of vastly differing skill levels, none of whom are benefitting from playing there nearly as much as they could be, because the repertoire is either far above or far below their skill level.

I will say that community orchestra can be quite fun, but it’s a flawed solution that doesn’t address the fundamental issue with amateurs playing Classical music, because it doesn’t create new repertoire.

I’m still not convinced. What are some tangible reasons that we need to establish ensembles that play new music? #

Here is an incomplete list of all of the reasons I have been able to think of and write down for why we should establish ensembles that play new music.

• To provide musicians repertoire that is well-suited to their skill level
• To provide musicians repertoire that is more personally meaningful to them than pieces written centuries ago¹
• To give small-time composers a reason to write music¹ (as writing music to have it be played by a VST, or to only speculatively have a chance at being performed months or years later, is supremely discouraging)
• To fix the drought of new Classical music (which is caused by a lack of financial incentives to write new music), which cannot be fixed without either financing composers to the tune of many millions of dollars or turning amateur musicians into composers
• To fix the odd problem of the orchestration preferences of late 18th and early 19th century Viennese composers determining which types of ensembles are practical to form and which are not (for example, there are far more string quartets and far fewer of every other ensemble type than there would be if we weren’t on so reliant on existing repertoire, much to the chagrin of non-string players)
• To provide repertoire for extremely uncommon forms of orchestration like viola duos (transcriptions are at best a very flawed solution - they’re inaccessible to obtain, they don’t always work, and some instruments like recorder have just a hair too little range to make a faithful transcription most of the time.)
• To provide repertoire for instruments that are essentially Classical based on range and tonal characteristics, but had the bad fortune of being invented after the standardization of the symphony orchestra or just didn’t make the cut (e.g., saxophone, double ocarina, modern keyed recorders - indeed, any instrument that will be invented in the future will be a second class citizen in the Classical world from day one!)
• To fix the “repertoire gap” - why isn’t there Classical/Romantic² music for recorder, viols, and unkeyed winds? Why isn’t there Baroque² music for modern brass instruments? Should people really have to endure playing repertoire they might not like because they didn’t pick a bowed string instrument?
• To motivate beginning Classical musicians to keep playing before they reach community orchestra level/standard chamber repertoire level
• To accelerate the learning of Classical musicians (I was awful at rhythm, then progressed very quickly after playing with other musicians in an orchestra forced me to work on it - I’m sure many musicians have a similar problem)
• To provide a more exciting alternative to community orchestra for more skilled musicians
• To fix the problem of there being few avenues to play with other Classical musicians outside of music school
• To fix the (inaccurate) public perception of Classical as elitest, which will probably always persist to some extent as long as most of the music that is played was originally commissioned by a rich person

How do I get involved in a New Classical ensemble? #

Head over to Local Chapters to see which New Classical chapters (which each contain one or more ensembles) are active near you!