Contemporary Music Review

Vol. 31, No. 4, August 2012, pp. 291–296

On Teaching Composition
Fred Lerdahl

I address composition instruction at the graduate level in terms of both intuitive guidance
and the teaching of craftsmanship, with illustrations from lessons with recent students. I
stress the importance of traditional training, review strengths and weaknesses of
Columbia University’s graduate composition program, and discuss a seminar that
connects composition to relevant issues in psychoacoustics and music cognition.

Keywords: Originality; Craftsmanship; Exercises; Cognition; Concerts

Instruction in music composition divides roughly into two parts: teaching

craftsmanship and guiding a student toward his or her own path. The first can be
taught, but the second is a mysterious undertaking. I shall devote a few remarks to the
latter before turning at greater length to craftsmanship.
The greatest talents find their paths—their originality—without guidance. Many
young composers, however, pursue what is fashionable in their environment; they
imitate others in search of approval. Imitation may be useful for a very young
composer, but after a point it is the surest road to obscurity. To counter the herd
mentality and encourage independence, I tell my students to follow their noses and
not look over their shoulders. This advice does not always help, for the impulse
toward independence must come from within. An alternative approach is to confront
the student with a strong position about his or her music. When I was a graduate
student at Princeton in the late 1960s, there was enormous pressure to conform to the
precepts of Babbittian serialism. I found my own creative voice partly in reaction
against this pressure. Remembering my rebelliousness, I am suspicious of students
who always follow my advice. In my teaching I used to encourage originality as if it
were a delicate flower that needs just the right sunlight and fertilizer to flourish, but
now I usually give the student a very direct opinion. Even if my judgment is off the
mark, the student has a strong view to deal with.
The cases of two gifted students at Columbia University, recently graduated and on
their way to substantial careers, will illustrate these remarks. The first student
looked over her shoulder for years, no matter what I and my colleagues said.

ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) ª 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2012.725814
292 F. Lerdahl
Fearing obviousness, she packed her scores with so many notes that the overall effect
became gray, and she suppressed out of embarrassment her earlier activity as a
composer and singer of rather good pop tunes. I urged her get back in touch with
that side of her creativity. She has finally succeeded in finding her creative voice by
transferring her singing to experimental vocal composition, which she combines with
spare instrumental writing enhanced by extended techniques that correspond to the
vocal gestures. The second student, in contrast, had already found his own voice in
strikingly imaginative instrumental textures. His obsession with these textures,
however, led to such a degree of repetition that his musical forms became paralyzed.
My response was frontal attack—polite, of course, but almost as repetitive as his
music was. Now his music has direction without sacrificing its marvelous textures. In
both cases, any credit on my behalf is indirect at best, for these composers, having
energetic creative personalities, made the changes themselves.
Turning now to craftsmanship, I firmly believe in traditional instruction in ear
training, tonal harmony and counterpoint, tonal analysis and standard instrumenta-
tion and orchestration. Such instruction is important for two reasons. First, one learns
from the central tradition. Besides, the notion that contemporary compositional
practice has nothing to do with the past is destructive in its self-imposed isolation.
Second, contemporary music has not coalesced into a common practice in which basic
principles of musical organization are agreed upon. Instead, there are many styles and
compositional methods, and each composer must find his or her way through the
maze. With no articulated and consistent criteria for composing, there can be no
viable pedagogy employing only contemporary techniques. Common-practice tona-
lity, in contrast, does provide such criteria. In mastering tonal harmony and counter-
point, the student learns how to pose and solve compositional problems within a clear
framework, a skill that can then be transferred to a less stable stylistic context.
It is also important to achieve at least modest competence on a few instruments,
especially the piano, and to learn to conduct. Composers who have played in or
conducted ensembles or orchestras have a heightened sense of the way in which
instruments relate to one another in both rehearsal and performance. Such
experience is valuable not only for composition but also in coaching performances.
In addition to its obvious practical value, conducting promotes an awareness of the
rhythm of musical form.
Compositional mastery includes other areas as well. One should know repertory,
both traditional and contemporary Western music as well as music from other
cultures. One should learn extended instrumental techniques currently in common
use. It is important to master the basics of computer-music technology, including, at
a minimum, digital music notation, sequencing and editing, and spectral analysis.
Some knowledge of psychoacoustics, music cognition, and the more important music
theories is also requisite.
The mastery of all these subjects is daunting, and their inclusion in composition
programs varies from school to school. The composition program at Columbia has a
mixed record in this regard. Courses are available in conducting, orchestration,
 Contemporary Music Review 293
ethnomusicology, various music theories, psychoacoustics, and music cognition. We
require two semesters of computer music, two semesters of music theory, and two
semesters of analysis of music since 1900. To qualify for dissertation work, students
must pass an hour-long oral analysis exam on a tonal piece and deliver a public
presentation on a contemporary work. The dissertation consists of a major
composition and a minor essay; the purpose of the latter is to demonstrate the
student’s competence in writing about music.
But there are weaknesses as well in our program. We have so many applications for
admission, and so little infrastructure to handle them, that it is not feasible to test
applicants on their skills in ear training or tonal harmony and counterpoint. In
deciding admissions we rely almost entirely on an evaluation of the submitted music.
As a result, some admitted students turn out to be weak in basic musical training. To
rectify this, I sometimes teach a course in advanced counterpoint or tonal style com-
position, but none of my colleagues do so, in part because my attitude about traditional
training is not universally shared. We do not examine our students on their knowledge
of repertory or music theory. The public presentations on a contemporary work are
often poorly organized and analytically weak. I am distressed by what many of our
students do not know and how incompletely our program addresses their deficiencies.
How these concerns play out in composition lessons is far from obvious. Magnus
Lindberg and Kaija Saariaho tell me that Paavo Heininen, the legendary composition
teacher at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, put his students through a gauntlet of
compositional exercises inspired by his own training under Vincent Persichetti at
Juilliard in the 1950s. One exercise might be to compose a short piece for two
clarinets using only two interval classes; another to create a series of phrases that rise
and fall in tension using only tetrachords in quarter notes; another to write a duet in
which the violin is in one tempo and cello in another, with both notated as if in a
single tempo. If I understand correctly, Heininen did not let his students compose
freely until they had passed muster on these exercises. Magnus and Kaija complained
at the time but later appreciated what they had learned from this pedagogical course.
I have sometimes requested similar exercises of beginning masters students, for
instance a lyrical melody that they then sang or a rhythmic etude for two bongos that
they then played. But lately I have drifted away from these exercises, for two reasons.
First, our students have become increasingly varied in background and level of
development. Up to 40% are from abroad, and many come already with a masters
degree. For these students elementary exercises are no longer appropriate. Second,
our composition faculty encourages students to study with at least two of us in the
first three years of graduate study. This policy defuses competition among the faculty,
exposes students to multiple perspectives, and enhances the cohesiveness of the
program. Moving students around makes particularly good sense in view of our
admirably diverse and accomplished faculty. The downside of the policy, however, is
dilution of consistent training. In the case at hand, our faculty is not likely to agree on
pedagogical assignments of the kind just described, and it seems pointless for me to
pursue them alone.
294 F. Lerdahl
What are my composition lessons like? Some teachers prefer to teach what they
themselves do; the student becomes an apprentice in the master’s workshop. Other
teachers prefer to approach lessons in terms of the student, varying the approach
depending on a particular student’s abilities and goals. At the risk of over-
generalization, the former kind of teacher tends to be European, the latter American.
The American approach reflects the anti-authoritarian, pluralistic character of our
society. I take the American approach and teach my own methods only if a student
asks me to. My first lessons with a new student are devoted to listening to and
discussing his or her recent music and to getting a sense of his or her technical needs
and aesthetic goals. Subsequent lessons focus on the current compositional project.
What happens after that depends on the case at hand.
Examples from recent lessons will give an idea of the compositional issues I deal
with. At present I have three new students. Composer 1 showed a fine piece that
suffers from two related flaws: the big arrivals all land on obvious downbeats, at
which point they freeze harmonically. (It is amazing how many students fail to take
advantage of simple transposition.) I showed the student how to achieve rhythmic
and harmonic elaboration without diluting the musical ideas. Composer 2 showed a
piece with good technique, but its ideas are poorly focused. Consequently, the
musical flow often degenerates into textural doodles. I helped the student locate the
few striking ideas worthy of development and suggested how the doodling passages
could be made more memorable by projecting internal patterns. Composer 3 showed
a piece in a semi-random style that progresses in static blocks separated by silences.
First I suggested notational improvements that would better convey the composer’s
intentions. Then I observed that the silences in the first half of the piece are too
regular and predictable. I invoked Samuel Beckett’s novel How It Is as an example of a
work that thrives on paragraphs of differing length separated by silences. Finally, I
suggested that the piece would be stronger if some of the sound blocks were not
merely static but progressed in some kind of process to another state. We will work
on this in future lessons.
I also met recently with two dissertation students. The first showed an ensemble
piece that begins in noise and progresses to fully pitched material. I pointed out that
after the opening the noisy transition is too long and the arrival of pitches too abrupt.
Noise, once introduced, takes on a structural value that must be incorporated
organically into the musical flow. The second student presented an orchestral piece
with great technical facility. However, the up-and-down contour of the music is
much too obvious, and the orchestral writing is overstuffed. I said that the contour
shapes must be disguised and that orchestration is a matter not only of
instrumentation but also of pitch register and density. I urged the student to prune
the score as much as possible.
All composition teachers encounter these and related issues of compositional
technique or craft. Sometimes I deal with them successfully, sometimes not. My wish
for a more coherent, articulated approach to teaching composition, along with a
desire to inject more of my own thinking into lessons, has recently taken a new form.
 Contemporary Music Review 295
In spring 2011, I introduced a seminar, ‘Composition and Cognition’, in which I
attempted to bring together my dual career as composer and music theorist to
address problems of musical organization in contemporary composition. The next
semester I gave the Bloch lectures at UC/Berkeley on the same theme, and I
concurrently taught a related seminar. David Wessel, director of the computer music
center at Berkeley, participated in the latter seminar and lent his expertise in
psychoacoustics and experimental psychology. In both the Columbia and Berkeley
seminars, I started by discussing the gap between compositional method and
perceived organization that is endemic in music of the last 100 years. Then I lectured
for several weeks on auditory streaming and fusion, the perception of grouping and
meter, the psychoacoustics of pitch perception, the cognition of melodic and
harmonic structures, and issues of atonal, microtonal, and timbral organization. At
that point I turned the seminar over to presentations by the students on topics of
special interest to them. In the Columbia seminar, these topics included the
hierarchical organization of Turkish microtonal music, psychoacoustic salience as a
marker of musical form, a semi-formal approach to microtonal organization, a
summary of Hindemith’s theory of harmony and its relevance to recent music, a
typology of musical gestures, experimental approaches to melodic expectation, an
attempt to develop a syntax for spectral harmony, a historical review of rhythmic
complexity, and the perception of musical form in Nancarrow’s complex canons. The
topics in the Berkeley seminar were of comparable interest and diversity. In the future
I shall continue with such seminars in the hope of providing a more coherent and
scientific understanding of contemporary compositional practice. They are a
complement to rather than a substitute for individual lessons.
Composition lessons take place in the context of the overall ethos of a composition
program. My greatest pride as a composition professor has been to help develop a
vital community of composers at Columbia. When I arrived there in the early 1990s,
the graduate composers scarcely knew one another; the alienation was palpable. To
address this problem, my colleague Jonathan Kramer and I started a weekly seminar
in which the students and composition faculty gathered for shoptalk, presentations,
and colloquia. At first, discussions were strained, but eventually they took on a life of
their own and brought the community together. These meetings continue to the
present day.
A second innovation was to reconfigure the organization called Columbia
Composers, which produces concerts of music by our graduate composers. Columbia
Composers had previously been directed by faculty with the help of a teaching
assistant, and concerts had taken place at Miller Theatre on campus. I increased the
funding and turned the concerts over entirely to the students with the idea that the
responsibility of producing concerts on a substantial budget would provide good
professional training. Columbia Composers is now run by a revolving board on
which all graduate composers serve for a year or two. Rather than continue at Miller
Theatre, they usually give concerts at various halls around New York City.
Advertising sometimes brings in large audiences. The feeling is not of a campus
296 F. Lerdahl
event but of a professional one in the midst of the city’s artistic culture. Some of the
performers are our own students, but most of them come from New York’s excellent
corps of freelance musicians or from fixed ensembles devoted to new music. At the
present time, three of the best New York contemporary ensembles—Argento, Wet
Ink, and Talea—were launched by composers who were students at Columbia at the
time of their founding; a fourth, Pamplemousse, is co-directed by a current student.
These groups in turn help forge connections and performances for graduate
composers beyond the activities of Columbia Composers. Admittedly, these
developments would be difficult to achieve outside of New York.
I have never forgotten that when I was a graduate student I learned as much from
my peers as I did from my professors. The combination of the weekly group seminar
and the student-run performing organization ensures that our students will learn and
grow together.
Beyond giving lessons and seminars and fostering a propitious climate for our
graduate composers, my role as composition professor entails helping students
launch successful careers. This means writing endless recommendations, encouraging
students to attend workshops and festivals nationally and internationally, urging
them to submit their work to competitions for awards and prizes, helping them find
publication and recording opportunities, and advising them on how to apply for jobs,
how to give good job interviews, and how to negotiate if they receive job offers. I take
this role very seriously.
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