“Students’ questions are always very pointed about ‘How do you do this, how do you do that, how do you write in these styles, etc.’ My response is always to ask, ‘Have you dissected the popular songs of all the eras to find out what makes them work? Have you analyzed them to find out what the chord progressions are, what the melodic tricks are, what chord tones on what chords created a certain sound in a certain era? And can you sit down and write a song in that style because you have spent hundreds of hours dissecting those songs?’ And they say, ‘Not yet.’ Well, I have. I have spent thousands of hours dissecting and playing those songs. It’s a matter of craft, it’s a matter of study.”
~ Alf Clausen, Film and TV composer
Great music takes a great deal of hard work to create. It won’t just “come,” no matter what your music teacher says about “letting the music flow through you”. Music is not a spirit. Music is a medium of communication and as composers we need to learn to direct the vast amount of communicative potential it possesses. We can learn how to do this through careful observation of creation, hard work, diligent study and academic humility. Proverbs tells us that “the hand of the diligent makes rich” (Pro 10:4) and “The desire of the sluggard puts him to death, For his hands refuse to work;” (Pro 21:25), so why do we think we can experience great musical success if we don’t work for it? We live in a world where reality is defined by God rather than man, and if we want to succeed in it we need to live according to the principles of creation that He has placed therein, such as: “Whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.” (Gal 6:7)
If you don’t sow, don’t expect to reap.
It is interesting to note that in times past this (correct) attitude towards honest toil used to be the culturally accepted norm, even in “artistic” fields. Rushdoony points this out in his article “Genius”:
“In Christian Europe, the artist was not an artist in the modern sense. He was a craftsman, an artisan, and a businessman who was a specialist in his field. …The Christian artisan did his work like any other skilled specialist, without any pretensions.”
~ R.J.Rushdoony, from Roots of Reconstruction
Noted historian Paul Johnson has this to say about Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), a Christian artisan who arguably became the most influential musical figure of the last millennium:
“Bach was by far the most hardworking of the great musicians (emphasis mine), taking huge pains with everything he did and working out the most ephemeral scores in their logical and musical tonality, everything written down in his fine, firm hand as though his life depended on it—as, in a sense, was true, for if Bach had scamped a musical duty, or performed it with anything less than the perfection he demanded, he clearly could not have lived with himself. It is impossible to find, in any of his scores, time-serving repetitions, shortcuts, carelessness, or even the smallest hint of vulgarity. He served up the highest quality, in performance and composition, day after day, year after year, despite the fact that his employers, as often as not, could not tell the good from the bad or even from the mediocre.”
~ Paul Johnson, from the book, Creators
Consider Bach’s theory on academic success:
“I was obliged to be industrious. Whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well.”
Here’s some food for thought:
If Bach, who did not have as great a wealth of musical content to learn from, or technologies as advanced as we have to benefit from today, was able learn so much about music in his 65 years—couldn’t we (theoretically) have just as much influence on the course of music history as he did?
No.
At least, this is what I’ve been told by several musicians upon their first hearing that I was an aspiring composer. They’ve informed me that there is no possible way I could ever be as good as Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven. It’s just…impossible. From the perspective of my flesh, this is a convenient lie because my ego would rather believe my music is shoddy because I’m inherently under-privileged than because I’m a lazy student. Ouch. Were these above-mentioned men providentially granted gifts and abilities by God to be proficient in music? I believe so… but I also believe that any one of them would be deeply offended if you suggested he achieved that level of proficiency without having to work at it.
Hard work is distasteful to many, so it’s not surprising that scores of musicians today embrace an emotional, mystical and spiritualistic viewpoint that dismisses music-as-craft requiring hard work and industry to achieve excellence in it—because excellence is arbitrary!
Fact: If you want to write for films, the going will be tough.
There is no such thing as an easy path to musical greatness, and the relativistic “I just gotta wait for the right mood to hit” attitude is going to be completely unacceptable to any good director because a wise filmmaker understands that composition is a matter of craft, it’s a matter of study.
Will I ever be as masterful a musical craftsman as Bach? Beethoven? …John Williams? That’s really hard to imagine, but if I convince myself that that’s impossible and if I never strive after excellence with as much unrelenting dedication as they did, I never can be.