These represent a familiar pattern with people beginning composition. And they can be separated fairly easily with beginners - my S4 pupils for instance. I throw different ideas and methods at them and get them to try them. But it takes more than that to produce anything I would call music.

By way of analogy, every physical skill which you posess you start by consciously doing, and over time it becomes first natural and then subconscious. e.g. walking - watch the huge effort on the face of a toddler consciously putting one foot in front of another and maintaining balance. But when was the last time you consciously thought about walking? So it is with music. You must learn harmony, counterpoint, et al, but you need to first develop a knowledge of them, then a facility with them, and over due course they become second-nature. At which point separating your categories becomes both difficult and perhaps even unhelpful. There is no contradiction between good technique and intuition, so your categories of deliberate and intuition break down. Similarly I've heard several organists improvise fugues - so clearly the deliberate and seredipitious categories also breaks down.

What I think you have crystalised here is a helpful categorisation which might be beneficial to beginners and, might I say, also to teachers trying to help students in their compositions. But I believe that a natural synthesis of these categories occurs over time as the composer gains competence, and that in mature compositions disappears altogether.

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Daniel Davis
Edinburgh Recording Studio Windmill Sound

Edited by Daniel Davis (18/02/12 01:25 PM)

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