How long does it take to become a composer?
Lots of people come around asking for advice, wondering why they aren't better than they are. "I've been trying for a week/month/year and I haven't written anything good," they'll exclaim. I think it's hard for people (even those of us who have been doing this a while) to really internalize the true time scale we're dealing with when talking about learning a skill like composition.
I mean, it's not like cooking where something adequate is acceptable for everyday use. The only time we're really exposed to music at all is fully-formed, well-realized pieces by artists who at least mostly know what they're doing. So, while you can learn the basics of how to cook meals in an afternoon and be decent enough to throw together palatable meals for yourself and your family in a month, the standard of creation that most people are trying to reach in composing takes quite a lot longer than that.
As a serial hoarder of data, I thought it might be helpful to share my own compositional journey throughout the years to hopefully provide some perspective on the length of time. This is going to be a long post and, to be clear, I don't expect anyone to try and engage deeply with each example I give. The point is less to show off my music (though you're of course welcome to comment on it!) and more to vaguely outline the timeline of becoming a halfway-competent composer along with trying my best to document what sort of training I'd had at each point to help people get what the process looks like and how long it takes and what all those middling levels of "just okay" music look like.
So, who am I? Right now, I'm studying my master's in music performance on the bass trombone. I have been a musician since about 2nd grade and have been composing for about as long, though I wouldn't say I was particularly committed to it basically ever. I only really started to seriously study composition during the second year of my undergrad during COVID. I was lucky enough to have a few of my works performed by the ensembles at my college, but I have not made it as far as proper publishing or professional premiers, yet. I would say that I composed only occasionally until that time and I'd guess I put in about 5 hours a week for the remainder of my undergrad.
The pace here will start slow but the time jumps will start to be larger as we go on, don't worry.
I began my journey with some EDM after being inspired by my friend starting to write. Well, I had written some things earlier than that when I was taking piano lessons in the 2nd grade, but I don't have those anymore. Rest assured, they were likely terrible. The first thing I really wrote was in 2013. At this time, I would have been playing the cello in school for around two to three years with about a year of piano lessons before that. Every note was placed entirely by ear with guessing and checking. I would not have been thinking about harmonies at all, instead conceptualizing the piece entirely melodically. Notes were chose because they sounded cool and nothing much happens over time. From a production standpoint, the mixing and mastering is truly awful.
In February 2014, I offered my elite services as a composer to a Minecraft server that I played on. They were reorganizing into some kind of roleplaying server and needed some music to fill the vibe. I made a demo reel for the guy to share press. At this point, I would still have no knowledge of harmony and only the barest knowledge of music theory. I believe I would have started to try to think in keys and scales to speed up the process of searching for notes, but everything was still a guess and check process. If I had no music in my head, I was unable to write anything. That's partially why the demo reel was the way that it was (three bits of 30s of music separated by silence)—I simply ran out of ideas for each track and figured I'd deal with it later and send them the partially completed music to him all at once.
I'd return to that first theme a few times, actually. I'll spend a little more detail on these just because they're a great case study of how I was learning over time. The first of these was kind of my first foray into "proper" composing and is one of the earliest scores of mine that I have. I believe this happened in 2016 or 2017. Having spent a lot of time in orchestra, at this point (and in band! I would have started playing trombone, by now), I had a pretty good ear for call and response structures and a sense of momentum within the phrase. I would have a decent idea about keys, now, since I'd have had to learn all my major and minor scales for chamber orchestra auditions going into 10th grade. Still, I don't think I was thinking particularly harmonically. The time signature change was certainly not because I thought to be creative with it but rather that I realized I had made an error in the original theme and wanted the sound to match what I had been listening to occasionally for the past few years.
The next revision to this work was in October of 2018. The opening section I decided was too distantly related to the rest of the work and deleted it. The opening portion given a little bit better control of momentum during held notes and the piece as a whole was lengthened and completed. Measure 19 represents my first attempt at motivic development and it's quite clumsy. I basically just selected some sequence of notes out of the original melody and tried to make something new out of it. The idea is solid, but it really ends up feeling like something totally new compared to the original material in a way I was never happy with.
The transition out of this new idea is pretty decent, barring an extremely crunchy note at m. 29. I can't even pretend to imagine what I was thinking with that; it sounds very out of place. It's clear that I recognized that I had made "an idea" out of suspensions as I try to use them to return to the A theme, but it's also clear that I didn't quite understand how to set them up properly. The transition, therefore, feels very forced. It's also apparent that I have no idea what voice leading means, with large harmonic leaps happening in multiple voices simultaneously leading the whole thing to feel incredibly stilted.
The return to the original theme is decently well done: I fragment the different ideas even further into various sections, sometimes doubling them. It's a good idea, but it ends up not sounding "developed" compared to the opening. The final bit of the theme is restated in a very satisfying way, though (structurally, at least), which wraps the whole thing up somewhat adequately.
The second revision from December 2018 makes significant improvements. Most obvious is the better engraving which makes the music way easier to read and play. There's really quite a lot of very minor changes including to better voicing and some denser harmonies in the transition that make the piece work much better. There are still a huge number of flow issues, though, that make the piece struggle to really be enjoyable to listen to without criticism. At this point, I decided that I was too attached to certain things (like the middle section, which I knew didn't fit but couldn't bring. myself to delete) to really make meaningful improvements.
I want to make sure we're on the same page. Something of even the quality of "Wildlands" was an outlier, for me. I was right that the melody I had conceived of all those years before was better than I had any right to be writing. For example, here is a portion of a trombone quartet I tried to write which I find now to be truly awful. Past me must have agreed, because there's a revision in my Dropbox that removes the entire second section and tries to replace it. That version is also unfinished.
That all said, Wildlands was the thing the started to give me this feeling of "knowing how to compose." And I think that confidence made my progress speed up significantly. This trombone quartet is, in my opinion, the start of me writing music that was casually listenable. It may not be incredible, but it doesn't have any (many?) enormous errors that break your immersion. This was written in June 2019, the summer before I started college. At this point, I would have known my keys and had a basic understanding of harmony (and its implications for structuring works). I was starting to take music as a whole much more seriously leading up to this and it reflects in my ability to write music. I especially want to call attention to the fact that the running eighth notes in the piece are based on the bell tone-like idea that opens it, which is really the beginning of me starting to understand the development of ideas, something I'm still not especially good at. At this time, I was still writing mostly by vibes, despite all of my additional knowledge. Very little planning went into each work as I mostly just hummed my way through one section linearly into the other.
My second term in college, we were asked to write a handful of short works for our diatonic harmony class. This was my submission for the final. The three core theory classes at my school were really quite instrumental in stepping my work up to the next level, mostly in how they described large-scale structures in music, something I'd always struggled with (and continue to).
That term was finished online due to COVID, but those projects continued my feeling of success as a composer and I decided to begin actually taking composition lessons. These lessons pretty much immediately worked their magic as they were the first time I'd had real, actual feedback on my music from someone who knew what they were doing. Here is the work I submitted for my first term in composition lessons (now using Dorico!). Even though I have problems with it still, I think it's pretty evident how much more thoughtful this is than my previous efforts. My teacher guided me through creating a workflow for planning, sketching, and the finally writing music which was instrumental in my improvement. This work was finalized in November 2020.
The next milestone I want to highlight is from December 2021 this (listen) work for string orchestra. The assignment had been to write something out of my comfort zone, so I decided to try and write the entire thing in the whole tone scale, having long been interested in learning to write in less-typical tonalities. I'm quite proud of this work still, though it definitely has some moments where I failed to really deliver a consistent quality. While I was writing much more thoughtfully, now, much of my efforts were still inspiration-based, meaning that I still struggled to get out of holes if I couldn't immediately imagine the next part of the music. In particular, the cello solo at m. 92 was pretty much entirely half-assed after suffering through trying to write something there for a handful of weeks.
From 2022, I want to highlight this (listen) work, written for my buddy as a sort-of tone poem describing one of his D&D characters. I had started to do a lot of study of John Willams music ahead of writing this and I think that shows in the music. While I was gaining confidence, certainly, this was one of the lowest points in my life as a composer. Any kind of creation leaves you incredibly vulnerable and showing up each week to have your baby criticized is difficult. My teacher was fantastic and identified this struggle and we were able to work through it together. I still think this is one of the best things I've ever written.
The first work I had performed by one of the large ensembles at my college was this one (listen). This was mostly written during the summer after my first teacher left the school. It was based on some music I wrote for a D&D campaign I was running and expanded into something much larger. I'm quite proud of this one, too, but there are definitely still some growing pains to go through. In particular, there were multiple minutes of music meant to exist ahead of m. 193 which I could never figure out—the same issue as before of struggling to write without anything going in my head. As a result, the transition into m. 193 is still quite abrupt, in my opinion. I think I hid the scars of this substantial cut pretty well, but I was never totally happy with it. Ultimately, it ended up the way it did because I ran out of time and had to hand out sheet music to the players.
The last work (listen) I'll highlight was actually started in that summer of 2020 and was part of the set of works I handed to my new composition instructor as an introduction to myself. I worked on it off and on throughout my entire time at the school and it was finally performed in Spring 2024 by our wind ensemble. This work is, in my opinion, actually a little weaker than the previous one despite being finished later because of its foundation as something from the before times. The piece had come to mean a lot, to me, so it was absolutely agonizing to try and make changes to it. Eventually, I figured out what I wanted to do to make it into something pretty decent, but I never shook this feeling that it was perpetually dragged-down by some poor decisions I made (or rather, didn't make) when I first started it.
I actually mostly stopped composing after that premiere because the pay off of the performance provided me so little return on investment in terms of mental energy compared to what it took to write. I ended up with a feeling of not quite wanting to be a composer because of how lackluster it felt. Despite finding really great success until then, I actually have, to this day, completed zero works since this one, apart from small exercises. I attribute this to the hype-cycle I had set off in combination with burning out at the tail end of my degree. I still love to compose, but it has been hard to regain the passion I used to have for it.
Thanks to anyone who made it this far through the post. I of course cut out a significant amount of practice throughout all of this, so even this is an incomplete picture of the process. I struggled with confidence issues, perfectionism, and self-inflicted bullying throughout my entire time composing music. If nothing else, I hope detailing this will help someone out there be a little kinder to themselves.
Composing is hard. It's vulnerable. It's frustrating. Even though I'm quite proud of what I've done and even after all this time, I still have a lot to work on and deal with as a composer.
So that's the moral of the story. Be kind to yourself. Creation is hard.