Me composing at age 19, i.e. 13 years ago, i.e. just kill me now.

It recently dawned on me that I have now been composing music for TWENTY YEARS. I wrote my first piece for a 7th grade English assignment on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. I was 12 then. I’m 32 now.

I’ll spare you the psychological torment that’s accompanied this realization and instead offer you some advice from my two decades of experience:

Process

• Think carefully about what you want your piece to depict / represent / express. For me, this is probably 75% of my time spent working on a piece.
• Listen to your favorite pieces while reading along with the score. Don’t be afraid to imitate music by the composers you like. Eventually what is theirs will wear away and what is yours will remain. A composer’s language is the assembled residue of his many influences.
• Establish the ‘ground rules’ early on in your piece. What is the basic style / musical language? Is this piece going to be full of surprises? Full of whimsy? Full of solemnity? Give the listener some idea early on.
• Sometimes you’ll start off writing a piece following a certain “concept” (a theoretical approach, a program idea, a mathematical formula) and you’ll get to a part where your gut tells you to break the rules you’ve set up in order to achieve a more satisfying musical moment. Follow that instinct.
• Don’t be afraid to throw out what’s not working. With each passing year, I grow more confident abandoning ideas that I may have been developing for days. The effort you put in will pay off somewhere down the line, and your piece will be much the better; there are always more ideas. That said, sometimes composing is a real slog.

Structure

• Use patterns. If you want to surprise your listener with something odd, striking, or novel, it’s best accomplished by breaking an established pattern. Sudden changes in texture / style / patterning should be the exception, not the rule though.
• Structure your piece so that the main climax comes towards the end of the work. In the classical era, this was often the end of the development / transition into the recapitulation. The climax is often the most dissonant moment. (See the golden ratio.) Consider very carefully the architecture of smaller climaxes leading up to your main one.
• Fill the space. Look at a painting by a great artist or a film by a great director. Visual artists are keenly aware of managing the space in their frame and balancing all the parts. The same thing goes for musical textures. Think of each bar as a frame, a single shot, in your progression. Each beat, or the subdivision of each beat, is an area of the screen. Be very careful to balance the bar so that it is full. (See: Ravel, Dukas “La Peri”.) (But of course, not too full. See: Star Wars “Special Edition”.) The melody is like a character moving through the space.

Melody

• Let every bar of every part ring with melody (see: Brahms, Debussy, et al.)
• In traditional styles, the melody should have a fill at the end of a phrase (sort of a little melodic ‘tag’).
• Very often the best melodies have one apex pitch – a highest (or lowest) pitch that is not repeated. Many composers save this pitch for the end (or towards the end) in order to give the melody a clear shape.
• Melodic patterns that ascend by step are often very memorable (see: Richard Rodgers.) Stepwise patterning also breeds predictability, which gives you the opportunity to break the pattern and deliver a pleasant surprise.

Writing for musicians

• For some reason, Richard Strauss got away with writing outlandishly demanding passages for his musicians and nobody batted an eyelash (well, maybe they did, but now they don’t.) You’re not Richard Strauss. Make your music challenging and interesting and even novel, but achievable.
• Keep in mind that your musicians will be more engaged if they’re not sitting around for too long. That being said, when writing for orchestra or large ensemble, don’t include every instrument in every texture / passage. The orchestra has thousands of possibilities for chamber ensembles.
• Create opportunities in which you are writing for people you know, and write for their particular skills and personalities. This will make your pieces more rewarding for everyone, and will keep your performers coming back for more.
• Think too about the instruments you’ll be writing for. What makes them special / sound their best? What was their historical function? Try to structure your piece in some way around the instruments themselves.

Finally, I’ll just mention that I think the greatest compositional challenge is to write music for a solo instrument, especially an instrument capable of playing only one note at a time. Bach’s sonatas and partitas for the solo violin are about as good as it gets, but strictly speaking, we might say Debussy won this contest:

–to two of my baller friends:

Caitlin, who got a major profile in the New Yorker and whom you can see whenever you please on YouTube at Ask A Mortician:

Branden, (who, in addition to having a WIKIPEDIA PAGE has a fancy New York based profile of his own) who’s going to helm a new HBO drama, and who probably wouldn’t even want anybody talking about it since, as he says, ‘it’s just a pilot, and I actually have to write it.’

And let’s not forget about Eric and his several recent pieces, including birthright citizenship, megalomaniacal whiskey distillers, and innocents who plead guilty. And Courtney and her unlikely success with a Holocaust themed children’s book.

Suffice to say, I must be a good luck charm.

Look, it’s no secret that I spend a lot of time watching cooking shows, but it’s confusing to some people (like my mother), because they know perfectly well that at home I literally eat only hummus and salad.

So why do I love watching cooking shows? At the most basic level, it has to do with what Stephen Sondheim talks about in the preface to his book: there’s an inherent satisfaction in learning the technical details of a craft even if it’s not your own.

Beyond that, it’s about the personalities, and here’s where I should stop and clarify which cooking shows I like to watch. It’s basically three: Martha, Ina, and the Two Fat Ladies.

Should we investigate why I gravitate towards saftig older ladies? Probably not. But I will talk about what I like about each of them.

Ina Garten (The Barefoot Contessa)

With Ina, it’s her pleasantness: she’s always in a good mood, she uses excellent ingredients, she makes large quantities, and she lives part of every year in France. Do I enjoy seeing the interior of her East Hamptons house and garden? You bet I do. Would I want to live there? Probably not, although if we’re being totally honest, I’m sure I would jump at the opportunity.

I should also take this opportunity to point out that my blog, which I’ve maintained for something like eight years at this point, continues to generate a large portion of its traffic from an appreciation of Ina’s hottie gray fox model friend T.R (the guy who couldn’t catch a fish.)

Jennifer & Clarissa (The Two Fat Ladies)

With the Two Fat Ladies, it’s really the zaniness of Jennifer (whom I like way more than Clarissa) that interests me most, the fact that she’s always liable to break into song & dance, her ring-studded, nail-painted hands, her cigarette and vodka at the end of the episode. She’s basically my grandmother transported to the British Isles. And let’s not forget how lovely the scenery is in every episode, and the beautiful music.

Martha (MSL, Everyday Food, etc.)

With Martha, it’s Competency Porn. There’s literally nothing this woman can’t do. She builds trellises, plants crops, bakes bread, crafts her home decor, and explains it all with such perfect diction that I’m just slobbering over myself at the end of an episode. And though I’m a fan of everything Martha’s done (including her immediate post-incarceration shows where I’m sure she was drunk the whole time) nothing beats Classic Martha: the episodes of MSL from the early-mid ’90’s that I grew up on.

I also love that Martha has an opinion on the best way to do EVERY LITTLE GODDAMN THING, because I am the exact same way. And she never shies away from it – she just tells you that her way is ‘a good thing’; you can figure out for yourself what doing it another way is.

Plus, you all know how much I love homegirl’s social media presence.

Bonus: Yolanda (How to Cake It)

This YouTube Channel is one of my more recent culinary obsessions, and the nature of my interest in it is different – more philosophical. I don’t find Yolanda a very appealing personality. In fact, I think she’s probably one of the most annoying people on the face of the planet.

But you guys. The DETAILS that this woman puts into her cake creations are INSANE. She puts so much time, care, and attention into these cakes. It’s not like Cake Boss (cake boss) or Ace of Cakes or whatever: it’s far, FAR more refined and creative. Look at this freaking pizza cake and tell me it does not look like an honest-to-god pizza. Well it’s not – it’s fricking CAKE.

What I do like about Yolanda is that she ends each video by eating her creations, often just chomping into them without a fork. There’s such an irreverence for her painstaking efforts. When you see her make these cakes, you feel like nobody should ever disturb the finished product. I truly think it’s akin to those Tibbetan monks who make the sand mandalas and then blow them away, and that’s why I like her. It’s actually a lot like music performance: you work and work and work towards a concert, you play it, and all you’ve produced is sound waves, the least permanent thing there could ever be.

This video is RELENTLESSLY satisfying

Seriously, if I had one of those, I would NEVER leave the house.

Champaign-Urbana / Bloomington-Normal. Why do both of these towns have two names? I couldn’t tell you the difference between them, and there was no discernible border. Hey Illinois college towns: pick a name! Of note: Babbitt’s Books in Normal, a favorite stomping ground of David Foster Wallace, and some electronic music landmark at U of I:

Madison, WI. Bigger than I expected. Found a decent cafe with a bang-up bran muffin!

Wisconsin Dells, WI. This has got to be the worst place on earth, because it has all the gawdy tourist junk of a beach town without the beach! I guess there’s something naturally beautiful in its environs, but this town is seriously depressing.

Rochester, MN. OK to pretty nice. Must suck in the winter. Single busiest Chipotle I’ve ever been to.

Sioux Falls, SD. This town was unexpectedly interesting. After driving through so many hundreds of miles of cornfields though, anything would be. A very ORGANIZED city, small, but with a spacious feel. There seems to be a large African/Asian immigrant population. I even saw a Russian grocery sign IN RUSSIAN. What kind of KGB spy shit is that?? There is a replica of Michelangelo’s David in a park because why wouldn’t there be?

Vermillion, SD. Drove an hour out of my way for this one, and boy was it worth it. You see, the University of South Dakota is home to the National Music Museum, which I first learned of when Easley Blackwood whipped out some serpent pics during my orchestration class (I know how wrong that sounds…)

What an amazing collection – frankly, I prefer it to the Met’s and the Art Institute’s. Amatis galore, including the oldest surviving viola! The well-informed gentleman at the front desk gave me a thorough run-down of the collection. Vermillion is quaint and perfect, but the parking there is actually terrible!

Philosophical Rumination #1. It’s truly amazing how all this infrastructure – telephone poles, farming, roads – exists in the farthest interior of this enormous continent. A skyscraper is one thing, but literally hundreds of miles of planted fields is another. The music of Phillip Glass was excellent company during this portion of my ride; it paired so well with the miles of cornfields that it almost seemed like this is what the composer had in mind.

The Badlands. Driving through SD is very corny until you cross the Missouri river, at which point you cross over on to another planet. The badlands are totally rad. Great hike. Take the long way out along 44 – it’s totally worth it, and you’ll likely be the only other person on the road.

Rapid City, SD. An honest to god frontier town with an excellent pho restaurant and a piece of the Berlin Wall.

Mt. Rushmore. Have you ever stopped to think about how truly weird Mt. Rushmore is? I think we Americans take it for granted as this great national monument, but WTF?? Some rando Hungarian comes over and convinces the U.S. government that what we need is a 12-story high carving of four of our president’s ugly faces blasted into some mountain a million miles from nowhere? Um, OK?

As I stood there contemplating this, a young family came to the main plaza, and the little girl, about three years old, was LIVID, insisting that her father had told her that the presidents were going to talk. She was hella pissed, but she immediately lost interest and sat down on the ground and played with some dirt with her baby sister, to the point where the parents couldn’t even distract them to get a decent picture. This little vignette basically made my whole trip worthwhile.

Did I mention I’ve been checking into all of my hotels under the name Roger O. Thornhill?

A photo posted by willcwhite (@willcwhite) on Aug 25, 2015 at 11:46am PDT

Philosophical Rumination #2. Driving this far to start a new life gives the whole relocation an extra weight. Air travel has a hint of magic to it – yes, the flights can be long, but you don’t psychologically interact with space and distance the way you do in a car; driving connects you to the earth. It gives you time to contemplate vastness, and in my particular case, to realize how far from home (where’s home at this point) I’m moving.

Crow Indian Reservation. This is where my trip started to get sad. You can’t see much in terms of town life from the highway, but what you can see is depressing. This really stuck with me.

Gillette, WY. Truly a frontier town (with a Starbucks.) If you want to see some of the most beautiful, rugged scenery our country has to offer, drive through this part of Wyoming (and Montana); you’ll simultaneously get to see it being despoiled. I’ve never seen train cars in such proliferation, all filled to the brim with coal. Oil rigs in the fields. Cows. Listening to lonesome cowboy ballads (read: Lyle Lovett). Other than that, just digging the silence.

Billings, MT. I imagine this is what Ulaanbaatar is probably like.

Bozeman, MT. Well folks, shit gets real once you hit the Rockies. I thought the rest of my trip was just gonna be sad, but honey Bozeman is chichiCHI! Very happening college/resort town with rich people stuff including a stupendously overpriced gourmet market I went to for dinner.

Missoula, MT. From this point on, the trip got depressing again, because the entire Rockies were bathed in a smoky haze from the profusion of wildfires burning nearby. I did stop in Missoula, a surprisingly large city, for a vegetarian “pasty” which is apparently miner food, and was pretty decent.

Coeur d’Alene, ID. This is like a straight people-er version of Bozeman, and would be a decent, if slightly lame resort town were it not shrouded in carbon dioxide.

Spokane, WA. Once again, I’m totally blown away by how big these western cities are. Is Spokane bigger than Cincinnati? No, but it feels like it is, and surprisingly it seems like downtown is really the most vibrant area, but not in a re-vitalized, re-gentrified way, more just like, in the old-fashioned way.

Ritzville, WA. Drought.

Portland, OR. The drive west through Oregon becomes really beautiful as you get into the Columbia river gorge. Then the traffic gets terrible, but that’s just Portland. I’m so happy to be here, but honestly, you do get used to staying at a Hampton Inn. (Speaking of which, guess who straight-up turned Silver Elite status on this trip? This bitch.)

Alright PDX, let’s do this.

Big news: I’m moving to Portland, OR to take the reins of the Metropolitan Youth Symphony.

This all happened super fast, at the behest of my friend and colleague Andrés Lopera who’s now going to be waving stick with the Colorado Symphony.

I’m pumped to be a west coaster after having been raised in the east and marinated in the midwest. And you know what? I’m actually going to miss Cincinnati, like, a lot, which is something I did NOT think I would say when I first got there.

And so, I now give you, the things I will most miss about Cincinnati, OH (not including people or institutions):

1. Hearing my music on the radio every day. It literally never gets old.
2. The almond croissant from Blue Oven Bakery, and, by extension, all of their baked goods, and Findlay Market as a whole.
3. My vintage 1920’s apartment, and the Clifton Gaslight district generally. It’s like a page out of a 19th century story book, and among the most beautiful neighborhoods I’ve ever seen much less lived in.
4. The grilled veggie sandwich at Salazar OTR, a lunchtime staple on double rehearsal days at the CSO.
5. My commute down Central Parkway. You may think I am kidding, because who enjoys their commute, but I am 100% serious: and it’s a fun and windy road that few people seemed to take at the same time as me and it became a real pleasure once I grew acquainted with all of its twists and turns.
6. The Tea of Wellness and the Walnut Green Tea at Coffee Emporium on Central Parkway.
7. The garden at Iris Book Café, one of the truly hidden gems of the Over-the-Rhine district.

Honorable mention: the Pesto Tempeh Club at Picnic & Pantry, the Covington Basilica, Tiger Dumpling, playing tennis at UC (this would have made the list if not for the incessant sound of excerpts being practiced at CCM), Washington Park, and, honestly, a whole lot more.

But when you’re a musician, roving is the way of life; when you’re a conductor, it’s especially hard, because you really get involved and invested in a community and with the people who live there, and then you pick up and do it again somewhere else. I’m leaving many friends in Cincinnati and several artistic connections, but no family, nothing to really reel me back. But I’ll look forward to the next time I’m there, and I’ll try to find a substitute croissant in the meantime.