I frequently wish I could forget some music lessons because I never got good enough at them to get “past” the lesson.
For instance, I still check my counterpoint when posting videos because I’d rather share a boring example that uses mediocre counterpoint — at the level I stopped learning — than share a “good” piece of music that doesn’t have decent counterpoint (within my foggy recollection of ‘the rules’).
This is to say, musical education for composition gets sort of … endless.
It’s great that you’ve got a goal:
20th century late romantic
..because after that, I was introduced to dodecaphonic, chance, unusual notation styles, algorithmic computer compositional techniques, various world music, and so on until my head was swimming.
My greatest piece of advice to learn how to write music is to
write music — or, just make music that is your own — whether it’s “written down” or simply practiced/improvised and maybe recorded.
All the theory and analysis I learned was less important than the pieces I wrote, in retrospect. Writing taught me what I liked to write. Writing taught me ear training. Writing taught me how others respond to my writing (when I let them hear). Those things were more important to me than an analysis or a “musical understanding”.
feedback. You need a tutor to proof your work and point out when you've gone astray--someone to keep you on the straight and narrow. I would recommend reaching out to someone like @A.Heppelmann for private lessons.
Feedback is incredibly important. Esp counterpoint.
I think harmony, form, and orchestration are easier to teach to oneself than counterpoint and basics of composition. There is so much implicit knowledge that is conveyed in the feedback, pointing out where you are boxing yourself in, the difference between a correct solution and a good one, etc.
This is where I would have liked my education to have progressed further. I took classes and private lessons with some good and maybe great composers from some great “lineages” but I did not get as much music education out of a couple of them as I wanted. I learned more about what I call the culture of “the concert world” and stopped writing for six years. :(
My theory classes were mostly just a lab where everyone put their partwriting examples on the board, and then the entire class tore them apart.
Yep, that is a great way to progress!
You have ten seconds to be able to verbalize the scale aloud
Also memorize the orders of sharps and flats, which you might have done already if you learned circle of fifths. FCGDAEB, BEADGCF
the professor would make each student go up and play an exercise on the piano and sing solfege
Yeah, this is another good one. Stand in front of a class and sight read a middle voice in 4 part harmony using solfège while the teacher plays the other three. Nerve wracking, but educational!
And this brings me to the other greatest lesson, which is ear training. I’ve started giving my kids impromptu ear training exercises, like identifying when I play major or minor chords on the guitar. I try to trick them by playing minor chords energetically and major chords softly and slowly.
Another way to develop ear training is to “transcribe” your favorite pieces by ear into your DAW. The last piece I did was a Lupin (tv show) theme/cue, and I know I missed some inner voices, but I learned a lot. Much more than if I’d started from the midi or the score.
Anyhoo, once you develop the curriculum to write late romantic music, I’ll sign up for it.
Developing a curriculum is challenging. I was offered a position to be a lead instructor for a local college’s
electronic music course (my main focus over the years), but I’d need to have developed the curriculum in two weeks time, and, I’d only applied to be the
assistant at the time (I turned them down because it seemed like too much work for what they were paying)!
