The Craft of Composition (Fantasy On An Old English Air)

Many folks imagine that composers are suddenly struck with a lightning bolt of creativity as they sit at their pianos, enabling them to pour out divinely dispensed notes onto the page. In reality, inspiration plays a much smaller role than you'd think. It's the craft of composition - the nuts and bolts work that transforms a small idea into a cohesive and musically satisfying whole - that takes up the majority of a composer's time and energy. As composer Leonard Bernstein famously quipped, "Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time." In this episode, a "fan-requested" rebroadcast of an earlier episode, I break down some of the craftsmen-like decisions at work in my piece, Fantasy On An Old English Air, in an effort to demystify the process of composing music. (NOTE: Fantasy On An Old English Air was originally published by Shawnee Press but is now available as "print-on-demand" from Hal Leonard.)