I’ve now published way over a hundred Composition Exercises on this blog. Over a hundred quirky legs for your compositional brain to run away with, to dance on.
It started out with the notion that much amazing music remains uncomposed and unreleased because we procrastinate by fantasizing, discussing, reading about, buying and reselling gear, always on the lookout for the one machine that will finally get us ready to produce something of worth. So cutting back on that, like any abstinence from things that take up more space than they deserve, should have an effect on our actual work as artists: making art. Reflecting on the larger commercial and cultural context will shape the way we see our practice. Once I called that Composition Exercise #1, it felt natural after a few weeks to post a related thought as #2, and I soon found myself hitting double digits and then writing an open-ended series.
At first I thought I would go in the direction of actual traditional exercises and tutorials, provide tactics, solutions, software. I may still do that at some point, but it turned out that this series is about sharing ideas, making mental connections, pushing some notions ad absurdum, and seeing things in a new light. Changing the way you – and I – think. These are tools, heuristics, lenses, paradoxes, provocations for you, for myself, for later use in teaching and composition contexts.
As for me, writing Composition Exercises has become a compositional practice in itself: I think all day about what it means to make art in our current time anyway, how that relates to living a meaningful life, and how art offers us a playground for experimentation, play, training and reflection. And by now, whenever I notice something odd or intriguing about creativity, my mind goes „Wait – there’s a Composition Exercise in there!“ and I write the thought down.
In early 2016 I’d committed to posting on the blog at least once a week, and while I often didn’t have time for essays, Composition Exercises were a condensed way to share an idea instead of having it vanish in my notebooks and files, allowing me to write longer articles when they occurred to me. I write down many more ideas than I publish and the more I write, the more I think of new ones. Late last year I started posting twice, now I’m publishing at least three times a week. I often review and refine Exercises over time before I hit publish. That doesn’t mean that they’ll all be brilliant – some will per definition be above average, some below. Some have sparked insights in people or made them compose a piece of music. Many will go largely unnoticed, some deservedly so. That’s OK. It’s about the joy of the practice, the courage to own an idea, the habit of publishing something for others, thus training my brain, and maybe yours, to notice and to share.
Once or twice each month I share more thoughts, essays and materials related to the blog on my newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.