A Grove of Ashes and Aspens

Content warning: Mentions of death, mental health, suicide, and war.

Now Playing: The Time of Your Life by Elvenking

A question that composers who are just starting out sometimes ask, and one that is very worth considering, is the question of how to make music, specifically what music one should make.

This is an interesting question, especially for someone like me. My musical training is almost exclusively through an orchestral and/or concert band type setting, but when listening to music, the only time I’m listening to classical adjacent music is when I’m listening to the occasional jazz tune or video game OST track. Otherwise, I’m listening to metal, sea shanties, and folk songs, with some indie lightly sprinkled in.

The advice I’ve been and occasionally seen given is that composers should write music that they themselves would listen to. I believed this was the best way to do it for a while as well, which made my own composing very interesting.

As I said earlier, I don’t really listen to classical music hardly at all. However, the music that I compose can best be classified as contemporary classical. This directly shows that composing music that you would directly listen to isn’t always the best way to go about it.

I think a lot of the reason people give the advice in question is because there are a lot of contemporary classical composers who listen to classical music more than any other genre, sometimes exclusively. There are also some people who compose music for metal bands that metal more than any other genre. There isn’t anything wrong with this, and it seems to work for them, so I’m not trying to say it doesn’t work at all.

The situation that I am in directly shows that this isn’t the best option for everyone and shouldn’t be given as advice so universal that it’s the automatic response. I enjoy writing classical music and I’m very proud of the music I compose, but listening to classical music isn’t something I particularly enjoy doing. It’s missing a specific element of contributing to an overall story that I need in music to be able to enjoy it.

Before anyone brings up opera, choral music, and programmatic classical music, that’s not what I mean. I want you to consider it from the perspective of someone like me for a second. I’m a metalhead, I have ADHD, and I have a deep love of fantasy themes, like dragons, magic, and different representations of what that can look like.

The music that appeals to me the most is a blend of three different subgenres of metal: power metal, symphonic metal (as well as the blending of those two, known as symphonic power metal), and folk metal. There are a few reasons for this. The bands that I tend to like have an overall theme of telling a story in their music. What that story is depends on the band; Sabaton tell of heroes of war and historical battles, while Brothers Of Metal tell of the myths and legends of the old Scandinavian Norse and Germanic deities, and Elvenking tell of a lifestyle more influenced by and as a part of the old Celtic religion. Whatever that story may be, the story is there.

There’s a certain layer of raw emotion and showing the listener something that’s close to the heart of the people writing, and later singing the song, even if it’s about characters in a fictional world made specifically for the theme and lore of the band. Metal and punk are also genres that don’t shy away from harder topics, topics like death, political oppression from the higher classes, depression, and suicide and suicidal ideation. Many drag these darker themes into the spotlight because they deal with the effects themselves or they have someone close to them who deals with these directly.

This is why I now don’t tell people to write music they would listen to when asked. What I tell them instead is to write music they are proud of, and that if they write something and they’re not proud of the final product, that’s not a failing on them as a composer, but something that is going to happen and that they can learn from going forward. This way, they’re not stuck in a dichotomy of not really knowing where to start with writing the kind of music they listen to or trying to enjoy listening to the music they tend to enjoy writing, like I was. I want composers to enjoy their craft and be able to not feel constrained to only listening to and working in one type of music.

What are your thoughts? What do you think is the best advice to young composers for what kind of music they should make?