Do you write the sounds you hear?

Just the other day I found myself in a hazily lit apartment in Brooklyn. The party consisted of close friends gathered around a coffee table with crackers and craft beer. 

After a few laughs and sips, someone asked about what I do. 

I’m a composer. 

“That’s awesome!” 

I give my most encouraging smile. 

The person leaned in. “I always wondered, do you write down the sounds you hear in your head?”

Music composition has that mystery to it. Composers have this ability to pick up a pen and express their state of mind through sound. Musical sound goes straight to the soul that hears it. But you can’t exactly put a frame around a symphony the same way you can a painting. How are music compositions created in the first place? 

An Inner Sound World

Dreams are the birthplace of a piece of music. A composer’s inner sound world is strongly shaped by childhood and deeply transformed by the thread of life. We write what we wish to hear. We write the current relationship we have with sound. 

Like people, compositions need other compositions to be birthed. I once thought I had to listen to a lot of music to compose well, but I realize what’s more important is the quality of listening. The way a composer listens is the way they compose. 

I listened to Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro a couple of times while writing this. I heard fugues, I felt the triplets grinding against the bass, the pull of the violins as their hands ascend the fingerboard toward the dark timbres, I heard the expressivity of the soloists, their delicious vibrato. 

There are echoes left in my mind after I listen. Are they a kind of memory? As I recall the melodies and rhythms, the echo becomes active. They morph. The tones, the fact of their existence, their meanings, their connections, they are present in me for as long as I live. Sometimes I lust for more, to relive or recompose the trip, to see again the ever-changing musical landscape. What makes up this tonal dream world is what I write down.

The Wrong Inner Voice

So there I was at the party giving a much more sober version of this. But a gnawing question appears when I speak about being a composer. 

Am I lying to myself?

There can be a divide between what I say I can do and what I actually do. (I live for the day when that divide is no more.) I love spending time in the dream-experience of tones, these beautiful objects so worthy of our attention. I love listening to the way their relationships affect my body. It feels so good to go through a canyon of melody, to swim through an ocean of harmonic change.

But here’s my issue. Despite composing nearly every day, I haven’t published a composition in five years. Why? 

Why do those of us with talents hide or live in a way where the expression of those talents is minimized, or worse, extinguished?

I realize by asking this question I’m boldly treading into tender territory. 

It’s all too easy to let the blade of mediocrity slice away our creative ambitions. By this point in my life I’ve gotten to know the dragons of distraction. Bills I wasn’t quite ready for. Dishonest relationships. Nonsense jobs. Our creativity is a castle and one we need to protect so our dreams can flow out and guide others. But there are demons inside the castle too, and ones that can wreak more havoc than fire from the heavens.

What held me back? Why didn’t I share myself openly? 

The reason is simple. I had been listening to the wrong inner voices. You see, when I find a piece of music lying there on the side of the mountain, and I pick up my pen to sketch it down, I also hear other things that prevent me from writing it. I hear a voice that says, “Ah this again. No that’s not very good. It’s a bit like your first piece, isn’t it? Bach did it better. Elgar did it too. Didn’t Zimmer write that?”

I try to listen out for the intonation, the cadence of that voice, to see if I can recognize it. Where does it come from? Who put it there in my mind? Julia Cameron talks about ‘artistic injuries’ that can happen when we are impressionable. I can recall the memories of those that helped to generate this intensely critical voice. And I believed what it said for a long time. The immense beauty of music, like a hug from God, has kept me on the path to further understanding myself, but in truth, my relationship to it is complicated. Right next to the sound of music is a built in fear from so many years of listening to the wrong inner voices. 

The Right Inner Voice

The amazing thing I learned about listening is that it’s a performance. The musical and spoken sounds you’re listening to are in dialogue with you. I started paying attention to that inner voice more and more over the years before learning how to speak back and let it go. 

My latest composition was finished this past summer. Note by note, I built its form, called it “Under a foreign sky,” and wrote it for three cellos. And each time I was visited by the demon of fear, I’d watch it land on my desk and I’d give it a wave. 

Hey—thank you again for everything. But really. Your presence isn’t needed. You did a nice job keeping me safe all these years. But I’m good now. 

As my relationship with my inner voices got better, I saw the relationship I had with music improve as well. We aren’t separate from the music that lives in us.

Composing isn’t just listening to the sounds you hear. 

Composing is about listening to the right inner voice, and letting it ring openly in the castle of creation.

My sincere thanks goes to Rik van den Berge for our conversation that helped make this essay. Thanks as well to Chris Wong for your feedback which helped shape this piece, and for recommending me this link.