the lie that keeps you stuck

My Dearest Tortured Composer,

Today I want to tell you about one of the most important things about developing your own voice as a composer.

One that could make you start to sweat and curl up in a little ball on the floor.

But one that could also make your life much easier.

I’m talking about volume.

Last week I told you about “Yes And” composing.

Just letting the ideas flow. Saying yes to everything. Not stopping to edit.

And if you tried it, you may have ended up with a pile of musical ideas that feel a bit like this:

Rough. Unpolished. Maybe even embarrassing.

Good.

Because today I want to tell you about what to do with all of that.

And why that pile of rough, unpolished, potentially embarrassing music is actually the most valuable thing you own as a composer.

There is a story from one of my favorite books on creativity, Art and Fear, that I think about constantly.

A pottery professor divided his class into two groups.

One group would be graded solely on the quality of their best pot.

The other would be graded on quantity. 100 pots gets you an A. 90 gets you a B. And so on.

By the end of the semester something remarkable had happened.

The best pots in the entire class all came from the quantity group.

Not the group that sat around studying pottery theory and perfecting a single piece.

The group that just kept making pots. Over and over. Good ones, terrible ones, and everything in between.

And I believe the same is absolutely true for composers.

Because here is what volume actually does.

It gives you something to look at.

You produce an enormous quantity of work. You look at that work. You narrow down what didn’t work. You refine what did.

Over and over and over again.

And slowly, almost without realizing it, you start to find something.

A voice. A style. A way of writing that is unmistakably yours.

Now I want to be clear about something.

I am not saying you need to finish all of those ideas.

You don’t need to be a “completionist” about this.

I have started over 2,000 ideas for pieces in the last 10 years.

The vast majority, at least 80%, are not done and never will be.

But those unfinished ideas that didn’t work helped me bring together what does.

Each one was a data point. A piece of the puzzle.

But here is the thing that most composers miss.

You cannot think your way into finding your voice.

You cannot read your way into it either!

I have met multiple composers who were going to “finish reading this theory book before writing anything new.”

And I understand the impulse. I really do.

Theory books feel productive. Score analysis feels productive. Watching tutorials feels productive.

But here is what none of those things are actually doing.

They are not developing the skill of composing music!

Because composition is not a knowledge problem.

It is a skill problem.

Specifically, it is a decision making skill.

Every time you sit down to write, you are making hundreds of tiny decisions.

What note comes next. Where the phrase goes. When to hold back and when to let it rip.

You cannot develop that skill by reading about it any more than you can learn to swim by reading about water.

You develop it by doing it.

Repeatedly. Horrifically at first. Then less badly.

Then occasionally something remarkable slips out and you’re not even sure how it got there. Like a little frog popping up from below and saying “look at this.”

I am not saying you should never read a theory book or study a score.

I am saying you should spend significantly more time actually writing music than reading about it. And then, after you’ve written something, analyze it. Pull it apart. Figure out what worked and what didn’t.

That is the cycle.

Produce. Observe. Narrow. Refine. Repeat.

There is a secret process happening inside your brain every time you write music.

Even when it sounds terrible.

Even when you hate it.

Even when you are convinced you should have been a plumber.

Your brain is running a silent background comparison between the music you are writing and the music you love most deeply.

Analyzing. Cataloguing. Filing things away.

And you won’t feel it happening.

But one day you will sit down to write and something will have shifted.

Ideas will come faster. Decisions will feel more natural. Your music will sound more like YOU.

Sometimes you’ll sit down and its like a little musical baby just plops out on your desk.

I used to call this my “idea mailbox.”

Every time I’d sit down to write, I’d open the mailbox, and there was an idea!

Then I’d put the piece down for a few days and do something else.

Then come up the hypothetical mailbox again, and there’s another idea!

I experienced the power of horrible ideas recently.

I submitted a piece to a competition. There was a deadline so I just wrote it fast. Didn’t overthink it. Got it done.

When I finished I realized that almost nothing in the piece had anything to do with what I actually wanted to express as a composer.

It felt like a failure.

But here is what that failure gave me.

It forced me to ask a question I hadn’t asked in a while.

What music has actually influenced me most deeply?

Not the music I thought was technically impressive. Not the music I felt I SHOULD be influenced by.

The music that actually moved me. The stuff that made me want to become a composer in the first place.

I call this my swipe file.

A collection of pieces that represent the music most deeply embedded in your soul.

The stuff that sounds like home when you hear it.

And when I looked at my swipe file I realized I had been stealing from music that wasn’t even in it.

That competition piece taught me more about my own voice than six months of deliberate practice had.

Because each piece you write is not just a piece of music.

It is a data point.

A scientific experiment.

If it works, you learned something about what your voice is.

If it doesn’t, you learned something about what your voice isn’t.

Think about what we actually want as composers.

We want to write music that is masterful. That is a unique expression of ourselves. And we want to do it with a kind of effortless fluency.

The way Mozart allegedly sat down and simply wrote, quickly and without much deliberation.

That effortlessness is a skill.

And here is the thing.

You could write that way right now.

Not someday when you’ve studied enough. Not after you finish that theory book.

Right now. Today. Assuming you have a sheet of staff paper or a DAW open.

So what’s stopping you?

I’ll tell you what’s stopping you.

At some point, probably in the demonic hell realms we call school…

You were taught, and tortured may actually be a better word here, into believing that a mistake was something bad.

On the SAT you get penalized for wrong answers.

In music class you got corrected every time you played a wrong note.

And so you internalized a lie that has been quietly imprisoning you ever since.

The lie that mistakes are bad.

That they mean something is wrong with you.

That they are evidence you shouldn’t be doing this at all.

But if you want to make original music…

If you want to have a creative career…

If you want to be successful at any of this…

You are going to make an absolute mountain of mistakes.

Guaranteed.

So go make some mistakes, you sweet little tortured composer, you.

Next week I’ll tell you about the mindset that makes all of this sustainable. The one that separates composers who keep going from composers who tinker forever and never quite get there.

It comes from a Lebanese trader and its been used by Thomas Edison, Beethoven, and a fat fictional ship captain named Dmitri (that I completely made up).

Talk soon.

And remember…

The world waits for your music…

-Luke