Lindroth - Graduate Composition

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Teaching Composition: Artistic Growth

through Confrontation, Tact, Sympathy,

and HonestyScott Lindroth

Version of record first published: 12 Dec 2012.

To cite this article: Scott Lindroth (2012): Teaching Composition: Artistic Growth through

Confrontation, Tact, Sympathy, and Honesty, Contemporary Music Review, 31:4, 297-304

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Teaching Composition: Artistic Growththrough Confrontation, Tact,Sympathy, and Honesty

Scott Lindroth

Teaching composition requires different strategies depending on each students interests

and experience. Reflecting on my own experiences as a composition student, I have found

two teaching approaches to be especially helpful. Undergraduates frequently require

compositional exercises that build technique and confidence. More experienced composers

often benefit from carefully formulated confrontations that help students enlarge the

scope of their musical imagination. Seminars allow students to explore new

compositional approaches in the spirit of collaboration and experimentation. Such

experiences can open new avenues for creative exploration.

Keywords: Composition; Pedagogy; Conservatory; University

On 10 March 1996, the New York Times printed a provocative article by the

distinguished musicologist Richard Taruskin entitled, How Talented Composers

Become Useless. Now I do not know if the title of that article was Taruskins choice

or that of a market-savvyTimes editor (in which case this article achieved notoriety in

the same way as Milton Babbitts frequently quoted piece for High Fidelity, WhoCares if You Listen?), but the article caused quite a stir in academic circles. It was

certainly a topic of discussion among students and faculty at the time.

The occasion for Taruskins article was two new recordings of music by Donald

Martino, a distinguished composer who taught generations of students at Yale, New

England Conservatory, and Harvard. Taruskin seized this as an opportunity to throw

open a window on the miseducation of musicians in America.

Taruskin criticizes what he perceives as a lack of connection between Martinos

expressive intentions and the content of his music. It amounts to a familiar critique

of what he calls academic modernism. After remarking on Martinos purported

disdain for audiences, Taruskin delivers the fatal blow, saying Martino and others like

Contemporary Music ReviewVol. 31, No. 4, August 2012, pp. 297304

ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) 2012 Taylor & Francishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2012.725816


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him are still miseducating their pupils just as he was similarly miseducated. Since we

are taking part in a conference that focuses on how composition is taught, I wanted

to dwell on this criticism.

Taruskin makes an unjust accusation when he speaks about miseducating hisstudents, for it assumes that students wish to compose music like their teachers. Any

composition teacher understands that a large part of the job entails teaching

composers whose music is radically different from our own. Perhaps some composers

teach students who wish to write music like their teachers in much the same way an

apprentice learns from a master, but that has seldom been my experience.

I may as well confess that there was a brief period of time during my studies that I

sought out a teacher whose music I wished to understand intimately. I studied with

him for only one semester, but it was just as well, because that teacher turned out to

be utterly inscrutable, perhaps shrewdly so, for he may have been defending himself

from an over-eager student. Whether he intended to do so or not, the only way tolearn from him was through indirection: the offhand comment about standard

repertory work, a strategy in orchestration, even the way he sang a passage from a

piece. We as students gathered these fragments of information and constructed our

own independent musical worlds comprising creative misreadings of our teachers

work as well as of each others work. I cant think of another composer whose

students were as varied and as individually accomplished. Perhaps this is one luxury

of a conservatory education: composition instruction can be as familial as it is formal.

And yet I would not recommend this approach to composition instruction. It

entirely depends on the talent and resilience of the students to make the most of suchtraining. There is no safety net, no real guidance. The professor realized, perhaps, that

he did not have to teach because he knew his students were combing over his scores

as well as learning from each other. The gift he gave us was artistic independence and

self-reliance.

This approach, as frustrating as it was on occasion, was probably more effective for

me than studying with a teacher who simply reacted to my music from week to week,

offering advice on details of orchestration, counterpoint, texture, proportions, and

the like. Such instruction can be usefulit is what I experienced as an

undergraduatebut after a certain point I dont think it helps the student grow as

an artist. Working with someone whose music I admired but who was reluctant toteach forced me to teach myself.

Another teacher was far more confrontational. I was less interested in learning

from his music than I was in learning how to think more critically about composing.

I was forced to confront my own imaginative limitations and to consciously seek the

means to stake out a larger imaginative territory. Graduate school may be the last

chance a composer will have to fully indulge in this kind of learning, for it inevitably

slows down the creative process as old routines are called into question and new tools

are painstakingly built. It may also result in pieces that are not entirely successful,

which, in a school setting, constitutes a valuable lesson. The teachers job was to

create a space for us to take such risks and help us regain our bearings if we lost our

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way, though losing our way was in some sense the goal. The full benefits of this kind

of encounter during ones composition studies may not be realized until the student

has been out of school for a period of time.

Again, this is a risky strategy for composition instruction. My first thought was thatit is akin to a violin teacher changing the way a student holds the bow, a process that

ruins the students playing in the near term in order to achieve something far more

flexible and nuanced in the long run. In my case, a semester-long encounter was

provocative enough to get me thinking about what I might attempt as a composer

without entirely derailing me from what I felt in my heart to be the right thing to do.

Since most of my students are not attempting to copy my musical manner, and

because I am sometimes in a position of teaching students who might have started

composing as undergraduates, I do not have the luxury of teaching by oblique

comments and indirection. I have had to cultivate two basic approaches to

composition instruction.For the inexperienced composer, I have come to believe that he or she simply must

do compositional exercises involving counterpoint, working with intervallic

collections, and taking on a variety of formal exercises. This is odd for me, since I

never once was required to do this throughout my composition studies, but I cant

think of another way to build a foundation of technique, fluency, and some sense of

artistic self-assurance. I almost always adopt this approach with undergraduates. If

the student has an urgent expressive voice, it will come out.

With more advanced students, I attempt my own version of the confrontational

approach I found so provocative in my own studies. I think this can only work withstudents who have already achieved a sense of self-assurance as composers, students

who have a solid technical foundation, a familiarity with a great deal of repertory, and

the experience of mounting performances of several pieces. In other words, the

students music has a real point of view. In this case, the teachers job is to question or

enlarge that point of view without destroying it.

I think this approach can be especially useful today, when the range of musical

interests displayed by our students is far more varied than it may have been in earlier

decades. In fact, we can use this eclecticism as a means to question assumptions. It

offers a convenient way for young composers to recontextualize their musical frame

of reference.How does a teacher accomplish this? For me, it usually comes down to one of two

possibilities: pushing for greater abstraction on the one hand, or daring the student to

embrace the familiar on the other.

I would like to share two examples by students of mine that represent these two

approaches. The first student is a skilled composer of music that occupies an

extremely narrow expressive range. The tempi are inevitably slow, and his

preoccupation with timbre led him to explore the upper reaches of the harmonic

series throughout each composition. Generally speaking, timbre trumped pitch,

harmony, and rhythm. The music was ravishing but monolithic. By staking out a

narrow expressive and timbral territory, the composer ensured that every piece would

Contemporary Music Review 299


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sound distinctive in the context of works by other composers, but a concert of works

featuring this composer would reveal the limitations of his musical habits. What

appeared to be a vast space for harmonic and timbral exploration was in truth a

narrow slice of that space. What he needed to do was enlarge the harmonic andrhythmic context of his music to make his expressive agenda more audible, varied,

and meaningful.

Stating this another way, I felt his music would gain focus and expressive range by

bringing more conventional musical utterances into his work: melody, voice leading,

and harmonic rhythm linked to a more palpable harmonic palette. In fact, I would go

so far as to say that for a composer such as this, embracing such traditional means in

the context of music largely defined by timbre and texture is more daring than

remaining safely within the boundaries of timbral exploration. While it is impossible

in a presentation such as this to provide adequate context for the excerpt I am about

to play, perhaps you will sense the expressive precision and warmth that thecomposer achieved in this passage (see Figure 1, score notated in C).

I am especially pleased with the outcome of this process because the students

music could not possibly differ more from my own. I would not have solved the

problems we identified in the way he did. He wrote his music, not mine, but I dont

think he would have taken on the expressive issues we discussed without my

insistence.

The second composer is a current dissertation advisee. His previous studies were

conducted at very fine conservatories. He is an accomplished musician and a fluent

composer who plays several instruments and has a genuine love and a seriousscholarly interest in the music traditions of Scotland, Cape Breton, and the

Mississippi Delta. His first works at Duke were clearly modeled on this music,

sometimes not so different from the work of Edgar Meyer and other crossover artists.

For a composer with this facility, he quickly realized that he could easily land in a

rut in which he would simply recast vernacular idioms in music that is at once

familiar, audience friendly, but perhaps not terribly distinctive in the long run, par-

ticularly if several similar pieces were presented on the same program (see Figure 2).

In this case, a move towards greater abstraction offered him a means of enlarging

the scope of his work. Drawing on the cyclic and repetitive structure of much the

music he had been studying, he worked on pushing repetition to a far greater degree.The results might be called post-minimalist with repetitions of asymmetrical phrases

structured in such a way that they maintain narrative energy, but the use of

vernacular materials for the motivic and melodic structure of this music results in

something fresh and unusual (see Figure 3, score notated in C).

In both cases, the composers have enlargedthe scope of their musical imaginations.

They are not leaving something behind; rather, they are staking out a wider territory

for musical exploration. By embracing a wider range of musical materials in a single

composition, the music escapes the routine and merely professional. Such music can

share the stage with standard repertory; at the same time, it pushes against the current

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Figure 1 Chorale passage by a current Ph.D. student at Duke University.



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of conventional music making without losing access to audiences who didnt

know they wanted to hear this work. This raises a whole other topic: the role of a

composer in the larger world, or the danger of professional isolation and artistic

provincialism.

These strategies can be explored in more freewheeling ways in a composition

seminar, where interactions between students can fuel exploration. Last fall I taught a

seminar on sonification and auditory display that turned out to be surprisinglysuccessful, in part because I knew the students who would enroll already had an

interest in this subject. The seminar was greatly enlivened by the participation of

media artists in Dukes Visual Studies program. They brought a visual sensibility as

well as a strong critical dimension to the readings and discussions. Paradoxically, by

composing music that was in some way driven by data, the students found ingenious

ways to salvage conventional modes of musical expression, in part because the data

set sources offered extra-musical context for their compositions. Nearly everyone

completed the seminar with plausible drafts of pieces that could be fleshed out into

viable concert works. One student will be touring with a member of our dance faculty

in performances of the piece he composed in the seminar.

Figure 2 Music in the style of a jig by a current Ph.D. student at Duke University.

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Another successful example I have seen was a seminar on music copyright law

taught by my colleague Anthony Kelley in conjunction with faculty and students at

the Duke Law School. The composers were challenged to use copyrighted material in

such a way that exposed ambiguities in the copyright law. My favorite was aminimalist treatment of the Andy Griffith Show theme song. One could hear Earle

Hagens theme gradually disappear into a dense minimalist texture entirely derived

from a single melodic fragment. Through such seminars, our students can engage in

serious play that goes on to fuel their individual efforts as composers.

Next year I hope to teach a graduate seminar on string quartet composition in

collaboration with our quartet in residence. I will be completing a new string quartet

over the summer, and so I will be prepared to move students through a great deal of

repertory as well as engage in hands-on experimentation with sympathetic musicians.

My goal in this class will be to encourage them to quote passages from earlier

repertory and adapt them for their own use. No other medium is better suited toengage in a conversation with the musical past, whatever the student may think of it.

It will constitute a confrontation of a different sort, perhaps a Bloomian exercise in

creative misreading. My hope is that this creative engagement with the past can be

artistically liberating while cultivating technical skill and flexibility.

In closing, I admit that such staged confrontations are not the best thing for all

students. There are times I take a more conciliatory approach, especially when

students are insecure or are struggling with writers block, anxiety, personal crises, or

other occupational hazards. One valuable lesson I learned during my student years

was that as I moved from one composition studio to another, I received a good dealof contradictory advice. Such experiences reminded me that music is essentially

heterogeneous and open-ended and that we each had to define our own artistic

identity. Yet, I also came to realize that my ability to choose the kind of music I was

going to write was not completely within my control. Ones artistic urges and

instincts cannot be entirely set aside, no matter what your mentors urge you to do.

Cultivating and accepting who you are as an artist is one of the most difficult rites of

passage in any composers career. In the end, it is our job to help our students achieve

this artistic maturity through calculated challenges, tact, honesty, and genuine

sympathy.

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Lindroth - Graduate Composition