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Autumn 2013 The Trombonist
COMPOSER’S CORNER
by Simon Wills Two pieces of advice: 1 - Keep it simple. 2 Having kept it simple, see how many notes you can cut out. Most composers write far, far too many; if you aren’t sure whether you need a note or not, you don’t need it. Oh, I nearly forgot: 3 - Write explicitly for the trombone, which is different from writing stuff that happens to fit onto it. The instrument has characteristics and limitations - use them, don’t ignore them. That took 76 words (how very apt). Now, I haven’t written much for my own instrument so let me tell you how I go about composing in general. I start by imagining players, a hall, an audience, and start writing when I can, to a limited extent, see and hear the performance; after that I write quickly, with flights of fancy balanced by an old-fashioned and rather ruthless technique: 2B pencils, manuscript paper, no keyboard and generally straight into score. My music is usually tuneful but is highly organised intellectually - and that’s all I’m going to say about that. Modern orthopraxy requires people to compose as though a linguistic or structural template, perhaps even the programme note, were the point of the piece. That’s like caring more about the paper on which a letter is written than what the letter says and is part of the reason why so much new music is unplayable.