A Post about Composing in Language, Sound, and Music

Joe Collins

November 9, 2014

The idea of composing in language, sound, and music can really broaden the horizon of an artist's abilities, especially by adding a wide array of new media for an artist to explore. Things like poetry and music and even just sound can invoke a feeling inside a listener in a many different ways.

From experience, I didn't know much about how to understand poetry because personally I was never really able to figure out what was inside a poet's head.

Basically what I've learned is that music is in a dire need of another shift in major genre. A new sound or way of writing music needs to be established but right now the people exploring those options seem to be exploring without a cause. For example Shostakovich has a composing style that had never been seen before when he began writing music, but he did so because he was trying to express his pain and strife; but when someone like John Cage writes a piece that can only be played by and "electrified cactus" and "other amplified dried plants" just for the sake of emulating nature, I think it gets a little ridiculous. For poetry I got better insight on how a poet writes his or her poetry and it helped me understand how to interpret poetry better.

Honestly all that I would like to learn more about is poetry. Now that I understand it better I think I should take another look at the poems that they tried to have us study in high school.

In conclusion, I think it is always a good idea to, after a period of composing art, to step back and take a look at other options in composing, even if it's something avant-garde to your time, like Debussy or Shostakovich.