Over the past few years since my last post about beginning to compose again, I’ve enjoyed witnessing some of my music being heard live. I can absolutely tell you that along with conducting, there is no feeling quite like hearing your own music played for you.

Much like conducting or being an instrumentalist, there is an amount of preparation that goes with being either of those two things. There is score study, practice, revisiting fundamentals, refining technique, private lessons, attending masterclasses, and teaching to keep one fresh and capable. I’m excited to continue doing this with composition even more than I already was, and a large part of that is doing transcriptions.

I’m disappointed that I never really dug into this myself when I was a composition student at Indiana. I’ve seen some of my colleagues really get a lot of value out of it; I remember one composer in particular really wanted to master some of Rachmaninoff’s rich, harmonic language, so after doing some transcriptions he was then able to add that language to his arsenal of techniques and incorporate them into his own music. Going even further back, I’ve heard stories of my dad transcribing some of Mozart’s piano music when he was growing up. Regardless of his musical skill level, at some point he was able to compose a small creation of his own that was in the Classical style. I think back on it now and am just seriously amazed that he could do that.

A lot of this has to do with the amount of information we retain from using pen and paper rather than typing. I can write a whole other blog post about why it’s better for the composer’s mind to write music with physical materials rather than just “plug and play” into notation software like Sibelius or Dorico, but I think this idea was mentioned in John Adams’ memoir Hallelujah Junction as well as a different blog post by composer Eric Whitacre. Both composers share my point of view.

As I’m in between projects (more on my most recent project a few paragraphs down!) I began work on transcribing the first movement of Mozart’s Prague Symphony. It’s an odd choice, especially since there are other pieces that can teach you more about Romantic harmony like the Rachmaninoff example, or that can teach you about Baroque counterpoint like Bach’s Art of the Fugue. But I chose this piece and movement for a couple of reasons.

The first is that it holds a special place in my musical development. I know the symphony well as I had to prepare it for my graduate school audition.

The second is orchestration. After coming off a recent project, I wanted to see how another composer treated writing for strings and winds. I made my orchestration decisions based on what I was taught in classes and from what musically makes sense, and I wanted to see how Mozart thought about the orchestra in comparison. More specifically, I wanted to see how he thought about the orchestra as he was near his peak, without straight-up transcribing the 4th movement of his Jupiter.

The third is counterpoint. There are better examples to pull from when wanting to absorb counterpoint, but I didn’t want to forget that Mozart was also a master in his day, as well as being able to see excellent counterpoint at play in a piece where counterpoint isn’t the main focus (like a fugue, for example). I wanted to see what material he chose and how inventive he was with it. So far I’m seeing it weave in and out so effortlessly, so much that I feel like I’m transcribing a grand fugue. But when I step back and look at how it’s voiced, everything is so clean and precise. It just sounds like Mozart being himself, rather than trying to be impressive.

And finally the fourth reason is endurance. While working on my latest project, the third draft was a rough full orchestration completely written out by hand. This draft ended up being just shy of 50 pages of 8.5x11—50 pages of redrawing clefs and labeling instruments, only to just get a few bars in or finish a phrase. There were times where I wanted to cave and just pop in and invent it as I went in the computer, but I would then remember that this is just how people wrote back then. Wagner was able to write these crazy huge operas, some of them so big with recurring characters and a story spanning multiple productions. Haydn was practically writing a symphony every week. Close to my project’s completion, I began the Prague transcription project because I wanted to simulate the feeling of routine composition. So far I can feel the difference it has made. No longer is composition “special and sacred” with each note I write, but so ordinary that I can hardly feel my pencil strokes anymore. To me it further cements the belief that Adams, Whitacre, my professors, and so many of my colleagues share: you’ve just got to do it by hand.

My most recent project, a full orchestra piece, is finished. All that remains is part extraction, editing out collisions, and making a conductor’s score. It took plenty of hours editing and tweaking to get it to a place I’m happy with, and I’m excited to hear it live in about a year. The entire process was long and arduous, but I know it wouldn’t be half as good as it is if I didn’t have a file folder bursting with pages of multiple drafts, edits and additions to add to those drafts, and form diagrams.

I suppose especially in this day and age, it’s far more satisfying to do the work yourself rather than let Sibelius or Dorico do the thinking for you.