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Going It Alone

I’ve been struggling to complete a three-minute musical composition for solo saxophone for the past three months; the fact that this has taken so long to do seems somewhat counterintuitive, but maybe it’s not.

Written By

Frank J. Oteri

Frank J. Oteri is an ASCAP-award winning composer and music journalist. Among his compositions are Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow for orchestra, the "performance oratorio" MACHUNAS, the 1/4-tone sax quartet Fair and Balanced?, and the 1/6-tone rock band suite Imagined Overtures. His compositions are represented by Black Tea Music. Oteri is the Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and is Composer Advocate at New Music USA where he has been the Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org, since its founding in 1999.

It seems like it’s finally nearing completion, but for the last three months I’ve been struggling to complete a three-minute musical composition for solo saxophone. The fact that this has taken so long to do seems somewhat counterintuitive: It’s not like it’s a large-scale piece either in duration or number of participants. So why is it so hard for me?

Part of it is that there are so many other activities that compete for my potential composing time—which is relatively minuscule already. But this is ultimately a lame excuse, because William Schumann—who ran Juilliard and then Lincoln Center—carved out 600 hours a year for writing music during those years and in that designated time managed to create four symphonies and scads of smaller works. I imagine “Bill” (I feel I can call him that after reading Joseph W. Polisi’s bio of him) could have knocked off this solo piece in a couple of days.

Part of it is definitely prolificity. I feel like an old man as I’m typing this, but I was a much faster composer when I was younger. (But I’m only 44—which is basically just the beginning of middle age, right?) I once spewed out a piano concerto—orchestration and all—in only nine days, and this was a clean handwritten manuscript. There was no computer notation software back then. Admittedly the concerto was never performed and probably never should be. The speed of my youth was definitely related to being less critical about what I was writing. Yet I think I’m equally critical of my writing when it comes to words and this essay you are currently reading probably took me less than an hour to write.

Of course, constant practice hones one’s comfort level, which has a direct correlation with productivity. I can write words so fast because I do so all the time. Few composers (and I’m not among them) are so in demand that they need to be composing morning, noon, and night. That said, I have encountered several composers who create massive amounts of music all the time whether anyone asked them to or not—I envy them yet at the same time am baffled by their fortitude, saddened that so much work goes under-recognized, and occasionally traumatized that there aren’t more effective ways to get all this music out there. All of this is somewhat creatively paralyzing as well.

But what is perhaps more of a factor than any of these things is that, at least for me, writing effective music containing only one line is extremely difficult. How do you create something that can stand on its own and not sound like someone playing a solo that’s supposed to go along with a Music Minus One recording without the recording? If you predominantly compose pitch-centric music in which vertical movement is largely defined against the backdrop of horizontal events (the old melody shaped by harmony paradigm), what happens when there’s no horizontal? How do you imply horizontal movement in a monophonic texture without it seeming like it is forced? Is it ever possible to not seem like a denizen of Flatland failing to convey a non-accessible third dimension?

This kind of composition is actually something I’ve never attempted before. When I was an undergrad at Columbia, my composition teacher Max Lifchitz suggested I write a solo flute piece, claiming it would be a great exercise for me and would likely get many performances because such pieces are always in demand. I now rue the day I categorically refused to do the assignment, declaring that such a piece would be antithetical to my compositional aesthetics. Nowadays, at least, I’ve learned to never say never. But perhaps the thing I still have yet to learn—just like everyone else who has suffered from writer’s block—is not to worry so much.