Category: Music Composition

A big part of evolving my own compositional process is letting it actually evolve and not forcing the issue. So I have discovered that seeing the page is also a useful and somewhat essential part of the process for me. In fact I can confirm that my brain seems to consider totally different things between composing in Logic Pro without any notation and composing in Sibelius notation software.

The latest version of my web presence is now up and running, but like my composition projects no work is ever truly done. The biggest addition is adding a way to purchase scores straight from the site either as bound scores (with or without parts) or PDFs available for download. I already see a lot of tweaks that will be necessary for my Shop, but at least I have something working now. 

In the course of creating my own website, I have looked at several websites for composers at all levels and points in their career. The importance of a good web presence for a composer cannot be understated. It will often be the first and main portal to a composer for performers or potential listeners.

As much fun as my Rails/React site was, I realized that I need my web presence to be easier to maintain. So I broke out my work skills and made myself a Wordpress version.

All of my Soundcloud, iTunes, and Spotify recordings can be accessed from here. I will also hopefully post to the news/blog section more often.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I thought it would be fun to write about my ever-evolving process of composing in a series of posts. If anything I thought it might get me into the habit of posting more here, breathing life into my personal website. Although some composers have a rigid process for conceiving and composing musical works, my personal process has been quite different over the years, and is often adapted to what kind of thing I am composing and how quickly it needs to be done.

After a fairly good run of performances, I have been stuck in a lull due to the time commitment required for my Computer Science degree (a math degree, in essence). Very quickly I realized that, unless you are famous, getting performances for my music requires constant pursuit. Along with that, composing is just like playing an instrument: without constant practice it can be very difficult to get back into a groove. In the past I would compose pieces specifically for competitions or calls for scores. As a result, I have a bunch of music with odd instrumental combinations that will never be performed.

In the article “Creative AI: Computer composers are changing how music is made” by Richard Moss, current trends in music composed by computer programs is examined. Artificial Intelligence is an area of research in Computer Science that deals with creating computer programs that imitate (to some degree) the human mind’s learning process. Moss presents several examples of different kinds of computer music composition including: programs that are able to mimic a specific composer’s style (Well Programmed Clavier by David Cope), those based on biology (Iamus), and even one that automatically composes music for video games based on the live situation in the game itself (Mezzo). Many people wonder if A.I. composition can truly be creative, and if it is, can it put living composers out of work? On the latter, I don’t believe that A.I. composition will likely be able to supplant actual human composers. The question of a computer program’s capacity for creativity, however, is a much more complicated and subjective problem to address.