Hey all, I wondered if any of you felt like giving a stressed finalist some advice. I'm enjoying all my courses this year except Tonal Composition, which I absolutely hate. I didn't really enjoy it last year but the reason I took it this year was because I got one of my best marks in it last year.

However every supervision I go to turns out with really negative results and I always come away thinking I can't do anything. This was the case last year too when I had several different supervisors. I don't think my supervisors mean to be demoralising, but they know and I know that I'm not producing anything of any value and that if I carry on in this way I'll fail the course.

I can't enjoy composition any more because I know that whatever I write will be torn to pieces in the next supervision. I can cope with this when it's my essays but not when it's composition for some reason. I hate writing; everything I put into Sibelius makes me cringe.

The problem is I've applied to do a masters in music composition in America next year. I've already paid £100 to do the Graduate Records Exam at the end of the month and have done all the complicated funding application and most of the actual application including finding references. I don't want to spend a year doing something I hate, but equally I feel like I'll be letting everyone down if I don't at least try to get this place. I really want to go and study in America, but I don't want it to be at the expense of enjoying my degree and getting the most out of it.

I don't know if I can change from Tonal Composition now - I don't think I'll find a supervisor for a dissertation this late in the term and I don't want to do Free Composition or Fugue. I'll probably have to pay some horrible fine as well. I also don't know if I'd be able to change the focus of my Masters' from Composition to Musicology (probably not, and if I did then it would look like I'm indecisive and I certainly won't get the place... it doesn't look like I'm going to get it anyway at this rate though!).

But basically I don't know what to do and I'm fed up of getting frustrated and upset over my lack of ability to write anything decent this year. Any thoughts?

Cheeble, I'm sorry to hear that things aren't going according to plan this year

Just a quick query - are you writing anything other than assignments for your supervisions? If you are, are those works more satisfactory?

Sorry to hear things are not going well. I have no advice yet, but several questions:

1) What is the definition of "Tonal Composition" in this course?

2) What is the nature of the criticisms?

3) Do you understand them?

4) Do you agree with them?

5) What is their nature (e.g. technique, aesthetics, something else, or a mixture)?

6) Have all your supervisors made similar criticisms?

7) What other courses are you taking and what is their relative value in your degree classification?

8) What is the relative value of the coursework and the end-of-year exam?

9) Is there any limitation of style, specific or taken for granted, in the American course? (I recall that Wuorinen's book makes it clear that he would expect all his students to write acerbic serial music: nothing else could possibly meet with his approval)

Sorry to hear about the tonal composition course. If its any consolation, I had the same when I was a final year student, but I respected my teachers and their credentials so much it made me more determined to produce something they liked.

I hope the GRE goes OK. I sat it along with the GRE Music paper (which I believe they don't do any more, is that right?) A good undergraduate degree here puts you quite a bit ahead of the average US undergraduate music degree. I was astounded that my scores were so high, so had no problem getting a place at my first choice university (although I didn't go in the end, and that;s a different story altogether....)

Hey there,

While I can't really help much on the music front, I would advise you to try not to let this get you down more than it already has. Everyone has times during their degree where all the courses seem to suck, the lecturers are unpleasant, unhelpful pains in the rear (phasing it politely) and you feel completely useless. If you've lasted all the way to the final year, then I reckon you're doing rather well.

(2 years into my 5 year degree, and I'm already alternately at war with my department, fed up with maths etc...!)

If it's just one course out of all the others, then that's another reason less to worry. Everyone gets courses they really struggle with.

Lastly, for some reason, lecturers, supervisors tutors and so have an irritating tendancy to be the most insensitive gits in the world. So try not to take their comments too much to heart. Also, you might find it helps to be particularly honest, and let them know, look, I'm upset, I don't know where to go with this course. It takes courage to admit that, but if you don't let them know when they're pushing too far, or that you occasionally need some encouragement then they won't ever do anything about it.

Hope you feel better about your course soon, and have someone to send real chocolate instead of virtual forum chocolate, *sends some*

Tamsin

1) What is the definition of "Tonal Composition" in this course? "This paper, examined by portfolio submission, is designed to allow students to develop to a higher level of sophistication the skills, practical knowledge, and insight into repertoire already acquired in the Part IB Portfolio of Tonal Compositions. In the Advanced Portfolio the idioms studied should be appropriate to a period and place in Europe between 1820 and 1900. " - so we have to compose either a four-mvt chamber work or an extended song cycle lasting not less than 30 minutes

2) What is the nature of the criticisms? mainly that I don't have any developable ideas

3) Do you understand them? yes

4) Do you agree with them? yes but I don't really know how to improve

5) What is their nature (e.g. technique, aesthetics, something else, or a mixture)? a mixture of technique, aesthetics... basically that I can't come up with anything worth developing into a full movement

6) Have all your supervisors made similar criticisms? yes

7) What other courses are you taking and what is their relative value in your degree classification? Notation, Performance Practice, Klezmer, Choral Studies, Recital. Each counts for 1/6th of my degree classification

8) What is the relative value of the coursework and the end-of-year exam? Tonal Composition is all coursework and counts for 1/6th of my degree classification

9) Is there any limitation of style, specific or taken for granted, in the American course? Not as far as I understand from the prospectus

katyjay - I'm producing sketches and ideas for my supervisions as well but none of them are any good either!

guilmant - thanks! I do respect what everyone's been saying about my work but it's difficult because neither they nor I can find anything worth salvaging in any of it :S so it seems impossible that I'll ever produce anything they like! You're right, they don't do the Music GRE any more, which is a bit of a shame I think!

thanks tamsin - there's some chocolate biscuits in my room so I'll eat them

Well, from Beethoven (though the works he wrote after 1820 would be very deep water to plunge into) to Debussy gives you a wide scope. I presume you have already done a fair amount of analysis of major works from the period. With which 19th C composers are you most familiar?

From the nature of the criticisms, I suspect you are aiming at the chamber work, rather than the song cycle. Do you have a particular instrumentation in mind?

I have never heard such a criticism in all my study, but schools of composition do have idiosyncratic criteria.

Beethoven could build a magnificent development on four notes. I am thinking of the second movement of the Eroica, in which the first phrase of the second subject, a four note descending scale, is inverted to become the subject of the gigantic fugato. Brahms 2nd is based on an even more succinct fragment: D C# D, which occurs in many forms across all four movements, albeit somewhat sparsely in the second. The proof of developability seems to me to be in actually developing it, and the quality of a work depends not only on how unified it is, beloved as that aspect may be to academics, but to harmonic sequences, at all scales (Schenkerians are obsessed with the large scale), textures, rhythm, and the way all these interrelate to control the emotional tension.

I can see how the criticism might apply to a 12-note sequence, to be used by strict serial relationships, but 19th C. relationships were not strict.


Being a contrary sort of person, I would probably try to show that they are wrong by taking the "unpromising" material and basing a movement on it. If you are still at loggerheads with your supervisors at the end of term, you might consider doing this over the Christmas vac., with the best material you have by then.

How strongly are you warned off continuing what you have started?

But a movement doesn't have to be based on a single idea. One is taught that in sonata form the second subject contrasts with the first. Would your examiners fail Schubert's string quintet because he keeps introducing new ideas, not always based on previous material, though always consistent with it? He unifies the movement by typical sonata methods of repeating with variation, including a splendid coda (bar 414 on) that uses both main ideas in new ways.

It may be that even if you appear to fall beneath your usual standards (and our high expectations) at Cambridge, you will nevertheless be very well qualified to study a Master's course in the US. A good A-level in the UK is equivalent to first-year (or even second-) degree studies in most universities in the US. The important question is whether you want to continue composing. What is your present opinion of what you composed before you got to Cambridge? You may be able to see faults in it, but I would not be surprised if you could also see value. Do you compose chamber music for your friends to play?

I see that I have asked even more questions, but your present unsettled situation comes as a great surprise, and I wonder whether your supervisors are somewhat exaggerating your "failures".

Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann really. I'm also getting to know Brahms and Lizst.



Probably violin and piano, or string quartet.



Pretty strongly!



I can still see the potential of what I used to write, but I'm finding it very hard to summon the kind of motivation and enthusiasm that used to make me want to compose. I used to compose music for friends to play, but now I just get too embarrassed to put anything down on paper. :S Not sure if this will change...

Thanks for all your help though, it's useful. However I'm going to see my Director of Studies this Friday to ask if I can change to a dissertation instead.

Go for the dissertation if you're getting writer's block with the composition. Make sure you select a supervisor that thinks the same way you do. You do this by suggesting a title that smacks of one particular member of the music department. That way you normally get the one you want.

Dissertations are not an easy option, but I found writing mine at Huddersfield a complete delight and enjoyed every minute of it including writing up.

That takes the problem out of the area of any expertise that I can claim, but I can still send you my heartfelt best wishes and hopes that it will all turn out well.

I did a dissertation which I really really enjoyed as it gave me a chance to concentrate on the period of music I enjoyed studying the most......

this rings alarm bells for me. Because if you were receiving constructive advice, which is what you are paying fees for (or someone is paying on your behalf) then you would come away feeling quite differently; namely, with ideas to try.

I teach at a uni and I can assure you that it's your tutors' job to "add value" to you and provide a supportive learning environment, ie give tips for the way forward, not demoralise.

I studied at university in a seriously unenlightened time and place, and I learned quickly that many people's advice was untrustworthy. Typically what you get is people deliberately discouraging you because, being a person who looks/sounds/talks like you, you won't stand a chance anyway so they are actually doing you a favour!!! Frankly, I'm not convinced things are so very different in some depts at some universities, in particular elite ones, so be careful whose advice you take. Sometimes the only person who believes in you may be you! My experience is there are big rewards for believing in yourself.

My other thought was that with creative endeavours, you can "try too hard". My own experience (based on research in maths, but my piano teacher told me his experience composing was very very similar) is that all you can do is inform your subconscious mind of all the information it needs, let it simmer, and let the solution/composition come to you. It comes when it comes. If you try to pull it out of your subconscious too soon, it's like constipation. If it comes and you don't take notes, you lose the detail.
Solutions come to me "out of the fog" that is deep inside an informed mind (informed by reading, results of calculations, experiments etc etc). It seems like magic but I've learned I can trust it.

How did it go with your tutor Cheebs.

If you can get a bus out to Burwell I can give you directions and we can have a chat.

hi guys,

thank you for all your help! my supervisor said I can change to a dissertation, and luckily I've got a really nice supervisor for it, so it should be fun!

I'll probably start composing again for fun soon though

xxx

Good ! I hope the next few weeks go well.

I certainly don't think you should give up composing - judging by what I've heard of yours previously !

Definitly keep up composing - I've liked what I've heard of your work too I'm glad you got it sorted!

that's good news. Composing for fun -- keeping it away from academic intrusion -- does seem the better option
for now givn your description of your experience so far. Have fun with the dissertation, really glad you have a nice supervisor

In addition to composing for your friends, you should not give up the idea of studying composition in the US. I would suggest, however, that you find out all you can about the style of composition and teaching at any university that you have in mind, to be as certain as you can be that you will not commit yourself to the sort of uncongenial environment that your Tonal Composition supervisors provided at Cambridge. Nowadays there is an enormous range of styles that are accepted by various audiences. Good teachers (e.g. Vaughan Williams, Messiaen) somehow manage to develop the strengths of their pupils; bad ones try to turn them into clones of themselves.

Thanks for all your advice, everyone. I've been very ill recently and in light of this I think I'm going to withdraw my application to the States, especially as I am not well enough to take the GRE this week and the people in charge won't let me change the date of it without fining me an awful lot of money! Studying composition is something I'll think about doing later in life, but I honestly can't see myself doing it right now and I don't want to put myself through the applications and interviews if I'm not going to do it right away.

Think I'll do a PGCE instead... or stay in Cambridge and do the 1-year MusB... which sounds like a bit of a joke of a degree although I'm sure it's actually really hard!!



that's funny, because that's the method I've always used but the guy who was supervising me seemed to think that I couldn't just sit around and wait for inspiration to strike and I needed to change the way I was approaching it!!

... think I'd rather just do it my way and enjoy it and produce something I like, than try and produce something that's going to work as developable material and make myself miserable

The guy supervising you is correct, if you want to make a career out of composing. You cannot afford to wait for 'inspiration', or you would rarely meet deadlines.

You also have the right idea, in that you need to do it for yourself first, and then see where things take you when you are happier & more confident with you music. Good luck!

I find not being able to wait for inspiration a truly remarkable claim. How on earth would one be able to make
a career out of uninspired music? and why would anyone want to do that?
Sorry, but I am a professional research mathematician, and the method I described has got me an international level
research career, which you don't get with mediocre work. And yes, there are deadlines. Also my teacher is a
professional jazz player and composer, and he said his creative experience was similar to mine.

So, how do get inspired work and meet deadlines? It's not that hard! You have to keep your mind rumbling along
with a constant stream of experiments and inputs appropriate to the creative activity (reading, listening, whatever).
I remember reading a quote by Matisse in which he talked about inspiration coming from the discipline of daily
work, in his case drawing.

It's like keeping a big ball rolling.......hard to get started, but easier when you do, provided you keep steadily
at it.

I suspect that most people start out composing only when inspired. For me, not needing to wait came from doing lots of composition to a deadline and hiding most of it away (but not destroying it). I had one compositional exercise that was half the length it needed to be and very unshapely at the time it needed to be handed in, but I thought it promising enough to resume work on it eight years later, and the conductor of my orchestra got the final version ("Actaeon": 5 Mbyte MP3 here) together for a performance at a patron's evening (50% chamber concert, 50% wine and cheese).

Cheebs in the new year we must meet up. I suggest you go and visit us, you can get a bus from Drummers street to five mins from my house daytime, and hubby or me (yes guys It looks like I'm going to be able to drive again) can run you back to Christs. Alternatively I go into Cambridge and we meet at Tatties for Lunch.

Both of us have written or are writing 3rd year music dissertations - the subjects may well have been different, but we have that in common. I gave up composing in Huddersfield in the second year, like you I could only write when the"muse hit me". It sounds like you need some time to chill with some one who actually managed to get all those final submissions in! I hadn't even read the list of result before my friends came up to congratulate me. I want you to have that feeling. Your name and the words Upper second or First Class next to them. Its the greatest feeling in the world. I know term ends soon So PM me when your back and I'll see If I can work something out.

Jo

Hope you feel better soon Cheeblies *big hugs*

I agree; I find that ideas come to me when I'm under pressure, but they're not always necessarily decent ones... I think that was the problem, I was waiting for something good to turn up. Who knows!

seems more like lack of confidence than lack of inspiration to me, but it didn't sound like you were going to get anything useful from
your demoralising and unhelpful tutors so you're right to put them away from you

from the tutor's point of view, it is hard to show students how to help themselves; how to get confidence, how to edit your work, how to overcome persistent difficulties. Some let their students drown. Some never let their students get in the water.
But to dismiss and demoralise is never right.

I have a good feeling about you cheeble. You'll find your way.

As I posted before, I am quite dubious about the criticisms that Cheeble reported: I don't see how they could be true (because they lack meaningful content). I guess the problem for supervisors is that teaching composition is very difficult. When I was studying composition within a style, the lecturer would point out common characteristics of the genre we were pastiching (e.g. the "Gondolier's call" in the Mendelssohn Song's Without Words with the title "Gondola Song", "false recapitulations" in Haydn string quartets), with the implication that we could reasonably put in one of our own. This doesn't apply to free composition, where you are at liberty to invent a totally novel form, with no similarities to existing compositions. I understand (from my own prof.) that Sandy Goehr gave up prescriptive lectures to his own composition students and instead invited them to observe him composing. I don't know whether he gave a commentary on his thought processes. One of Vaughan Williams' three famous women composition students (Grace Williams, Elisabeth Lutyens and Elizabeth Maconchy) commented that he never seemed to tell them to do anything very particular, but just discussing their work with him improved it by some sort of osmosis.

I strongly agree. Moreover, you (Cheeble) may well discover later some benefits of your time at Cambridge of which you are not yet conscious. We all know about precocious composers, like Mendelssohn, Schubert and Mozart. Note that many composers take decades to find the voice by which their reputation is assured. Janacek was 50 before he produced his first successful opera and was at his most prolific when over 70; Brahms was over 40 before he dared publish a symphony; and Vaughan Williams, though he had produced several works that have remained deservedly popular before he was 50, wrote his 4th symphony in a new and much more discordant style (to which he returned at intervals) at the age of 62. Elliott Carter, whose 100th birthday we hope to celebrate next year, is still writing as well as ever, in a very different style from that of his earliest works.

I remember my 3rd year at Cambridge, studying fugues and trying to compose them. I struggled all year in the supervisions, and finally about a week before the exams, to revise, I decided that what was good enough for many of the great composers was good enough for me - I sat down and copied out by hand, note for note, several of the '48'. Somehow I think I "absorbed" the flow of the notes, the thought processes etc, because when it came to the exam, I got further through the fugue than ever before, and I had already planned my final stretto section in my head when unfortunately I ran out of time....... But I got a 2:2 which I certainly wouldn't have expected based on my year's work....

This is an interesting point.....there can be a large gap between how a tutor feels towards their students and what they think they are doing, and how they actually come across.

The usual "extreme" example of this is a parent teaching a child to drive a car. The parent think they are investing time and effort
and even risking the family car. This show how much they love the child. But the child hears shouting from frustration and
incomprehension that such simple things are done incorrectly

I also see tutors waste their time making lots of comments on work that will not be read because 1) any praise is "pro forma"
2) there are no constructive "how to improve" tips 3) the marking criteria are not clear 4) the actual criticism is not clear.

I can remember feeling so frustrated when a teacher would draw a line under a sentence in an essay and write "expression".
Since I knew what I was trying to say and had no idea at all what the teacher's problem with it was, this criticism was unhelpful.
I was never told what the criteria for a good essay were, nor how to edit and improve my own work. Small wonder I did maths instead.

In the case of university tutors, the problem is magnified because their level of knowledge is so much greater: the level
of detail in criticism can be overwhelming.

My advice to Cheeble: manage the tutors and the dissertation supervisor in order to obtain the information needed:
obtain precise marking criteria in order of priority, ask what any criticism actually means, ask "where would you start" if there
is a lot of red ink.



I am not surprised that this was necessary!! I can understand reams of advanced maths but I find music theory really puzzling.
I think it is one of those theories that you have to understand all of it to understand any of it. I was reading Piston's book on Harmony and he says that any one chord can have 12 different meanings according to context....in other words, you have to have a big bank of contexts already in your head to decide what a chord is. However, all these example contexts come with chord progressions labelled.......there is no logical place to start to understand, just well-known bits of music and their agreed-upon analysis, and you have to do pattern matching from known sequences........aaaaarrrrrrggggggghhhhhhhh

OT: Good move. Mechanical Sciences (engineering) didn't need essays either. I learnt a lot about writing after I graduated, first from the Civil Service, in which even Scientific Officers were expected to be able to write, and there was a formal structure for putting a report into an acceptable form for publication; and second from reading "The Reader over your Shoulder", by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge (first edition, Reading Union/Jonathan Cape, London, 1944). This is a marvellous book that introduces one gently but thoroughly to the 25 Principles of Clear Statement and the 16 Graces of English Prose, with examples in Part II: 54 unclear passages from well-known contemporary authors, analysed for contraventions and re-written for clarity by RG & AH.

THANKS!!!! I'll look it up! BTW we're having to teach key skills to undergraduates these days, including writing to maths students
(the last final year dissertation I read over, I had to explain to the student that a sentence needs a verb ....) and yes, I make
sure that they are given tips on how to edit and improve their sentences and how to structure a paragraph, not just use the fancy mathematical typesetting software.

I once suggested to an American acquaintance that the two cultures were more widely separated in the UK than in the US. He denied it, and told me the following anecdote:

"You are in Boston, Mass, in the check-out queue for '10 items or less'" ["fewer" is not popular there either] "and see in front of you a student with at least 25 items. You ask him, 'What are you then, MIT and can't read, or Harvard and can't count?'".

I'm afraid he needs to sort that out before Graves and Hodge will be able to help him.

I just wish I could get the knack of writing short simple sentences. If I'm not really carefully, I end up with every paragraph containing just two sentences, which isn't ideal in technical writing.

I also get very bogged down with trying to expressed everything in the passive, when you can't use "I". The passive just makes everything long-winded.

On the other hand, few people seem to have real issues understanding me, so maybe I shouldn't worry too much!

It also leads some people into attaching their participles strangely:

"After correcting the errors, we repeated the experiment." ->
"After correcting the errors, the experiment was repeated." [Clever experiment!!]

Scientific American is worth reading for its good style.

My problem with technical writing is to convert what is a holistic understanding into something not only logical but that proceeds step by step in a strictly linear fashion. (hey, a tautology!) If I drew a picture of myunderstanding of a collection of related concepts, of all the interconnections and relationships, the picture would look somewhat tangled . But people read one thing at a time, so that is how you have to write.

There are ways of avoiding convoluted passive constructions. "A modified experiment that accounted for problems A and B was performed.". But it's difficult for a mathematician to avoid the subjunctive!! "Let x be the variable..", "If x were positive ...." and so on.
But there are success stories as well....
One chinese maths prof I had was really proud of himself when he produced a sentence on the board with " neither ...nor" in it.
Bless.

What's tautologous about that? You could proceed step by step in quadratic or exponential fashion

oh excellent!!!! (I'm sure Cheeble will find exponentially step-by-step explanations useful for a music dissertation!!!!!!!!)

The subjunctive...

*sudders*

Causes me serious issues when writing in German (while the passive just seems to come out okay, for some reason)... On the other hand, I suppose trying to master all these tenses in another language does help you to get to grips with them in your own.