Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Composer's Lounge When to compose?

Writing anything is a discipline. It's also 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Set aside 20 minutes a day when you are fresh and write something. Set aside another 20 minutes a day and analyze something (try one of the Bach 351 Chorales per day).

Brahms burned all of his string quartets (he supposedly wrote 160+) because he thought they were not as good as Beethoven. So don't be surprised if the things you write don't meet your expectation.

Get in the discipline of doing it. It's the same for a newspaper reporter, a novelist, a painter, a pianist, an architect, an engineer, or a composer. If you don't use the tools, they get rusty.

Use it or lose it!

I can relate to; my composition attemps after quite short time start to sound distasteful.
Is that because we use a composing program and numb our ear by listen over and over? (If so, how do you keep up with consumption of others work, while trying to keep your ears fresh?)
I'm really beginning to think the only feasible composition method is paper and pen. Maybe that will open up my inner ear, and will be the day I really begin understand composing.

Because Bach, Haydn and Mozart was mentioned in the thread;
Those we're deeply entrenched in the choral music, and had their roots there (?).
How do you compose for an instrument, how do you texturize it for example?
Should you as a beginner use the instrument as if it were an substitute for the human voice?
That makes soo much more sense to me after listening to alot of choral works. I can sometime imagine how an clavier would sound in some part instead of the human voice. Ofcourse I sense some limit in that approach, you can't bring out the instruments "own voice".

How is it going noobpianist90?

I've lost it.