Not being a composer

When I was thinking of going to music college thirty years ago, someone told me, "If you want to be a composer, try not to compose".  If this sounds strange, it was the best piece of advice I received, and I have often wished I could have fulfilled it.

If you can possibly tolerate not composing, I read it as saying, do something else.  I was too young and too confident of my own ability to read any serious warning into the nostrum, but I've had plenty of opportunity since to savour its truth.

Writing classical music continues to attract an awful lot of bright and talented people.  Despite its loss of cultural prestige, there are still enough names that resonate - your Bachs, Beethovens and so on - across a society now largely dedicated to getting its musical kicks via pop.  For the ambitious young musician, probably by some way the most able in his or her immediate sphere, the heady prospect of striding the world like a composing colossus has a tempting appeal.

Unfortunately there are an awful lot of other people tempted as well.  If I was the most gifted musician in my primary school, there were others at secondary level; at music college there were two or three other composers in my year; and there will have been other young composers at other colleges and universities around the UK.  How many spill out onto the streets each July?  Twenty?  Fifty?  A hundred?

For they and I are not the only people who can do what we do.  Far from it.  There are thousands of people around the country who can harmonise a Bach chorale, who can write a symphony or a concerto.  And how many opportunities are there out there for us?  Not very many.  Scan the concert programmes of the average professional symphony orchestra - how many pieces do they perform each year, and how many of them are premieres?  One or two?  Half a dozen?  Now consider how many other people are competing with you to get their work put on, and work out the chances of it being your piece brought beautifully to life by professional players.  Not great.

Ah, I hear you say, but I'm a better composer than the others.  Really?  Who says so?  I have spent years trying to convince anyone who'll listen that there are no objective ways of judging art, and that, once you can reach a minimum standard of technical competence, it's all a matter of opinion.  To paraphrase William Goldman, in classical music No-one Knows Anything.  No-one knows whether Pianist A is "better" than Pianist B, and no-one knows whether Composer Y is "better" than Composer Z. If you get your piece put on, it won't be because your piece is better.  No-one knows what better is.

No, some other factor will have worked out in your favour.  At the most basic level, it might be that the person responsible for the programming liked your piece more than someone else's.  Clearly that involves a significant element of luck (as well as the assumption that someone could actually read the scores and hear mentally what the music sounded like, a skill more often claimed than possessed).  Other factors may be at work too.  I have repeatedly heard variations upon, "Of course you know there's a gay mafia".  Sometimes it's a Jewish mafia or an Oxbridge mafia.

A friend who is a virtuoso once said to me, "Of course you know why all these beautiful young men get all the Wigmore Hall gigs?"  Since he was born in a country far away on the other side of Europe it would have been ill-mannered of me to point out that one of the variations on the Gay mafia theme is the notion that the English, with a curious inverted snobbery, prefer their musicians to be foreigners.

If I've never personally seen any evidence of any of these prejudices, it's certainly a great help to a composer if your face fits, if you are flavour of the month, if you know the right person, if, better still, you have slept with the right person.  It helps too if you're young and good-looking.  Why is Eric Whitacre so famous?  It can't hurt that he looks like Brad Pitt's brother.

So what happens if your ducks do all line up in a row and it is your piece that gets chosen?  How much money are you going to make out of the performance?  A few hundred quid if it's on the radio, but no more.  What if you've written a Christmas carol?  How much in the way of royalties will that get you?  In my experience about £0.10 per copy sold.  So you won't be running a car on your compositional earnings, let alone the deposit on the freezing garret you'll be writing in.

No, even if you are one of the lucky ones and can run to a dozen or so performances a year, you'll need some other way of making a living.  But here comes another complication - most jobs don't leave much time for composition.  I wrote an early String Quartet as a toilet cleaner, locking myself in the cleaner's cupboard for hours at a stretch, to the fury of my supervisor.  But this was a rare opportunity - most jobs demand too much of you - bought at the price of squalor and tedium.  At other times I got up early in the morning and put in two hours composing before going off to work.  But this was before children came along, with their night-time demands which made staying awake during the day hard enough as it was without getting up at six just for the sake of it.

I was lucky enough to get married to someone who likes classical music (although not all of mine), and was willing to tolerate my writing it and doing the child care while she got on with her career.  But you may not be so fortunate.  You might have to go out to work and be the main breadwinner.  If you really have a vocation to compose it will drive you crazy.  During the brief period I worked as a full-time lawyer, I often went and shut myself in the loo (is a theme emerging here?), sobbing with frustration at wasting my time and talent doing something someone else could probably have done better.

Although I have been much luckier than most, I would have to say that the life of a composer, even a moderately successful one (I do consider myself moderately successful, in the sense that I know others significantly less so) is one in which rejection and even humiliation have to be endured on a monthly if not weekly basis.  You are competing with a lot of other people for a tiny amount of work, and mostly you will be losing.

I am not trying to put you off composing (although come to think of it if that reduces the competition it's maybe not such a bad idea).  But what may seem like an obvious choice aged twenty has consequences which are as far reaching as those of any decision you will ever make.  If you can possibly tolerate not composing, don't do it.  Do something else (preferably not a loo cleaner though).  You'll be better off and happier.

Like most composers, there have been times when I've wondered whether the game is worth the candle, whether the low self-esteem attendant on being only moderately successful (after all, I know other composers significantly more so) might be dissipated by stopping writing altogether, by reinventing myself as something else.  But one's mind works in curious ways.  In the last few months some ideas have occurred to me consistent perhaps with being part of another String Quartet.  The other day I was finishing some piano practice, and was startled to find my hands wandering over the keys involuntarily, producing some new music which, again, sounded as if it might belong in the same piece.  That's the way composition works.  You don't choose music.  It chooses you.