I feel very fortunate to have taken composition classes from Columbia's music department. The department, although full of idiosyncratic academics, is eclectic, distinguished in multiple sub-disciplines, well-placed and integrated into the larger New York City music arena. There were just so many opportunities for performance, music-related networking, concerts and events! I constantly felt overwhelmed, the resources around me under-explored.
I also learned a great deal more about the nature of composers than I did about composition itself. For one, I learned that I am absolutely not cut out to be a composer. Composition requires long periods of focus and loads of self-discipline to command the attention span. (It also involves a lot of angst.) It is not, as I had naively thought, bursts of inspiration after which the music just magically writes itself. Edison's cliché truly applies here: genius is one percent inspiration followed by ninety-nine percent perspiration. No matter how many .wav files of improv I have saved on my computer, my only tangible compositional works are the pages of sheet music I painstakingly wrote out, note by note, contemplating each line, thinking and re-thinking, birthing them onto the manuscript paper (only to find out that my musical children weren't as pretty as I'd hoped!).
Composition is also a communal effort of the entire music community. Composers need to constantly network and attend concerts, listen and appraise. Through verbal and musical dialog, the composer determines what kinds of sounds he or she needs to write. This is a continuous and peer-reviewed process. No piece of music can be completely removed from context. Even Schoenberg's supposedly universal 12-tone music is a reaction to Western tonality. It deliberately tries to avoid references to established consonances and overused triads; this is a hallmark of modernism and is not by any means innate.
Finally, composers can be a little insane, and very flaky. My composition professors failed to show up to at least two classes each on average. All for the best though; in a true flakefest, I am probably the biggest culprit of them all.
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music is similar to life in its mortality and intangibility. composition is influenced by its surroundings as in life as well. at the same time, many of the greatest challenges also yield the greatest rewards. at a certain point, the work no longer has to be thought of in terms of other works, but can simply be your own self expression, straight from the heart. that's how i feel about composition and music in general.
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