Come Here Often?

Whenever I meet non-musicians in a social context and the nature of my job (i.e. “composer”) is made public, there are a few questions I can almost always expect to be asked. “What kind of music do you write?” is the first and thorniest. Both Frank J. Oteri and Randy Nordschow have, I believe, offered their Bellerophonian strategies on dealing with this chimera on NewMusicBox in the past, so I won’t bore you with my comparatively conservative playbook. (Quick story: One time, an elderly relative introduced me to an elderly friend of hers by first noting that I’m a composer which got a big grandmotherly smile and then adding, in a “you-know-what-THAT-means” tone of voice, that my music is atonal. Her friend suddenly looked like she’d bitten into a rotten piece of fruit. Thanks a lot.)

The question that always puts me on the defensive, however, doesn’t have to do with how my music sounds at all. It has to do with instruments; specifically, how many of them I play. Depending on how one defines “instrument” and “play,” the answer might vary from “some” to “none.” Neither of those replies is really satisfactory, though, as the question is usually asked with the expectation that I play all the instruments. After all, I write music to be played by a wide spectrum of instruments, right? So why can’t I play them myself???

I tend to get a little cagy when confronted on this issue. My stock answer is that I started out in music as a singer which, right off the bat, isn’t an “instrument” as most non-musicians understand the term and have since pretty much stopped performing written music, but that I know about a whole bunch of instruments, like really a lot of instruments, and I’m actually not as incompetent as I sound. Sometimes I also append a footnote about my years of playing rock music, although I decline to mention that almost all white male composers of my generation share this experience. Nevertheless, the disappointment is often palpable, and I try to quickly steer the conversation elsewhere.

What’s especially sad about such exchanges is that these people, who may not even be aware that composers exist anymore outside of Hollywood, assume that I am some sort of highly disciplined cyborg with total mastery of the craft (and indeed all associated crafts) of music-making just because of my job title, and I have to disabuse them of this notion. The good news is that my lack of instrumental expertise doesn’t usually diminish my cachet too steeply. “Composer” is, after all, a pretty cool job title to have, and that counts for something.