NEVER GIVE UP

Hoday,

As a music composer what do you do when you find yourself finished with your long or short term educational goals? What do you do when you start over again and again and again?

Well, the first thing is to evaluate yourself as a musician. Are you happy composing endless arrangements using various augmented sixth chords? Are you happy re-arranging symphonic sounds that were outdated 175 years ago? Although we must study the masters to understand the art and history of music, by the time we fully understand the last 6 periods of music, we're old!

Music today is all ABA or ABACABA form that originated from the Renaissance, to Mozart, to Beethoven, and passed down from there. It's all the same, the average listener just wants a good beat, the younger gens think they own their own originality, the older gens are complacent, ivory towers get taller, and glass ceilings get thicker.

No music is original. We listen to endless arrangements of the 12 bar blues, we hear a continual beat around 4/4 or 12/8 meter (I know, it's not a fraction, shut up), we watch un-educated singers pierce their mutational chink on television variety programs, we play low volume dinners so that people can talk, and we play for free because some young artist is playing for free at the local bar.

So what will you do? Try to get your symphony played? Try to record your great new stuff and sell it to a record company? Have your compositions played by local professors at some church or half-filled auditoriums? Teach? Perform? Play Golf?

Later,

John