This is a personal essay about my relationship with creating music or rather my lack of creation! When I was a younger creator, I believed I could move people, communicate something profound, or at least create something new. Let’s just say that at 41 I have lost most of that confidence.
This essay is a step to try and rebuild that belief.
I spend considerably more time thinking about writing music than actually writing music. This is probably not the best way to be a composer – but I sleep well at night by telling myself it makes me a better father.
I’m not the first or last person to struggle with the idea that what I want to create doesn’t have much purpose. There is already so much music. More music than I could listen to if I did nothing else for the rest of my life. More is being uploaded while I write this sentence. Thousands of songs, scores, improvisations, beats, film cues, string quartets, piano pieces, ambient tracks, bedroom recordings, orchestral works, AI-generated songs, live recordings, remixes, and whatever else are entering the world every day.
So I sit at a piano and start messing around with a few notes and eventually the question arrives: what exactly am I contributing here?
Really. What’s one more piano piece?
What Exactly Are We Doing?
Over 15 years ago, I studied composition and still try to listen fairly broadly, including to contemporary classical music, although I have a complicated relationship with a lot of it. I turn on a new string quartet and enevitably it starts out dissonant, rhythmically disjointed, full of glissandos, extended techniques, heavy bow pressure, and little “oh so clever” eruptions of sound. None of these things are wrong it’s just amazing that this is still where “new” music is. Of course I’m generalizing and I’ve heard great music that uses all of these techniques. But my gripe is that I don’t connect with that music. It doesn’t move me or make me feel much of anything. So, I look for more options.
When I was studying composition, I sometimes got the feeling that if someone enjoyed your music too easily, you should probably go back and figure out what you had done wrong. I was fortunate to have a couple professors who encouraged my more “pop” sensibilities, but there was still this strange pressure floating around the composition world that seriousness and difficulty belonged together. Incomprehensibility and cleverness were greater than music that people actually connected with.
The next genre I poke around in is a “classically trained” composer writing in a quasi-popular style. Try as I might, I can’t help thinking, “well, the actual pop bands are much better at this.”
So what exactly are we doing? Sorry, what exactly am “I” doing? (I don’t want to rope other people into my issues!)
Maybe I’m exploring. Maybe that’s enough. Some composers want to know what happens if you scrape a cello string in a new way while someone blows air through a bass clarinet and an electronic tone slowly moves between the speakers. Fine. There’s nothing inherently less worthwhile about exploring sound than exploring harmony or melody.
But that still leaves me sitting at my piano.
I’m not particularly interested in discovering what happens when a violinist puts aluminum foil between the strings. I’m drawn to write things that I think sound good not just writing something outrageous for the sake of writing something outrageous. Sometimes beautiful. Sometimes sad. Sometimes cinematic. Sometimes suspiciously close to pop music.
I like melodies and systems and intuition and intention – okay hard to pin down, but I know it when I hear it.
And then another problem appears: haven’t all the melodies basically been written?
Obviously not literally. There are effectively endless melodic combinations. But emotionally? Structurally? Hasn’t somebody already written the devastating slow piano piece? The bittersweet little miniature? The nostalgic string passage? The song about longing for someone who doesn’t love you anymore?
Probably several million of them.
So what am I doing adding mine?
More Than Three
Maybe the purpose is simply creation itself.
People say this a lot. Create for yourself. Enjoy the process.
I understand the sentiment, but I’m not completely convinced.
If the entire point is that I enjoy creating it, there are easier ways for me to enjoy myself. Writing music is difficult. It can take hours just to get four measures to stop sounding lame. I can watch Netflix with considerably less effort.
And if creation itself is the only purpose, why record the piece? Why publish it? Why perform it? Why put it on YouTube? Why spend time mixing it, making artwork, sending it to people, submitting it to performers?
Clearly I want someone to hear it.
Does the size of that audience matter?
I’d say yes.
Maybe that is impure. Maybe I’m supposed to say that if a single person hears something I wrote and is moved by it, that is enough.
I’m not sure it is.
Spending countless hours writing a piece only to have three people in the world hear it is not very satisfying. I don’t know what the magic number is that suddenly makes it satisfying, but let’s go with more than three.
I’ve written a few piano pieces that I think are decent. I put them on YouTube for free. Let’s be generous and say a couple hundred people listened to them.
Was that it?
Was that the payoff?
A couple hundred clicks and then the pieces disappear into the gigantic landfill—or library, depending on how optimistic I’m feeling—of music on the internet?
Then again, I’ve looked up composers who have won major awards, people who have unquestionably “made it” within the contemporary composition world, and sometimes their recordings have a few hundred views too. Maybe a few thousand. Maybe their subscriber counts are surprisingly small.
So apparently YouTube views are not a particularly reliable measurement of whether a life spent making music was worthwhile, surprised?
We live in a culture that is very good at providing numbers. Views. Streams. Followers. Ticket sales. Royalties. Commissions. Awards.
You can open a dashboard and find out exactly how many people listened to the first thirty seconds of something you made.
What the dashboard cannot tell you is whether making it mattered.
And I suspect I sometimes ask the first set of numbers to answer the second question.
There is an economic problem tangled up in this too, and I don’t think it should be brushed aside with romantic talk about artists creating for the love of art. Artists have to eat. And apparently my kids need to eat too.
I was watching a documentary about Rachmaninoff and thinking about this young composer getting full symphonic pieces performed at like the age of 17, building a reputation, existing in a world where a successful composer could, at least sometimes, actually be a public musical figure. Of course composers have always struggled for money. Patronage had its own humiliations. Mozart worried about bills. Bach had employers. Nobody was wandering around eighteenth-century Europe handing composers sacks of gold merely for following their creative truth.
Still, something feels different now.
A composer today can spend decades honing a craft, attend conservatory, earn advanced degrees, win competitions, receive commissions, get wonderful musicians to perform a piece—and that piece might be performed twice.
Maybe once.
Maybe the commission pays a couple months of rent.
Then the composer starts applying for the next grant.
Meanwhile there is more recorded music available instantly than any human being could hear in ten thousand lifetimes.
From the standpoint of supply and demand, perhaps the market has spoken. We have plenty of music.
Thank you, everyone. Great work.
Wipes hands on jeans, looks toward horizon.
Welp. I guess we finished music.
Apparently We Finished Music
It sounds ridiculous when put that way, but I saw someone make essentially this argument in a video. Why keep producing music when we already have more than anyone can consume? The same could be said about books. There are more great books in existence than I could ever read. Why write another novel?
That argument has a certain cold logic to it.
Why add more food when there is already more food on the plate than we can eat?
Except some of the food on the plate is getting old.
Maybe that analogy doesn’t quite work. Bach has held up considerably better than a sandwich.
But something does happen to art as time passes. It doesn’t necessarily become worse, but our relationship to it changes.
I love Bach. I love Indian classical music. I love music written long before I was born. One of the extraordinary things about being alive now is that I can listen across enormous stretches of history. Gregorian chant followed by Bach followed by Mahler followed by the Beatles followed by Thrice, all before lunch and all from the comfort of my home office.
That’s remarkable – albeit a little sad in the lonely consumption of it.
Needless-to-say Bach is not the music of my time. That does not diminish Bach. It simply means that Bach lived in another world. (Breaking new ground here with these insights!)
The great works that have survived across centuries tap into deep human emotions and experiences. Love, death, grief, joy, faith, fear, longing. Those things don’t disappear just because someone invents the smartphone.
But the experience of being alive does change.
The person writing music is a product of a particular time and place and cannot completely escape it. The sounds around them are different. The technology is different. Politics are different. Cities sound different. Work is different. Relationships are different. Religion is different. War is different. The way we experience loneliness is probably different. The way we experience community certainly is.
Even silence sounds different in a world filled with machines.
Aaron Copland wrestled with something very close to this question. Reflecting on why he composed, he said that “art summarizes the most basic feelings about being alive.” He wanted artworks to leave some permanent evidence of what it had been like to live in his particular time and place.
Part of what makes Bach valuable is precisely that he came from another time. We can hear another human consciousness reaching us across centuries.
Theodor Adorno, in considerably more complicated language than I am going to attempt here, argued that authentic artworks become a kind of unconscious history of their era. The artist does not have to deliberately write “about” the historical moment. History is already embedded in the materials available to the artist, the conventions inherited, the things that feel possible or impossible, beautiful or ugly, natural or strange.
I agree with that and think that may be one of the contributing reasons to write music.
Music carries history even when it doesn’t mean to. Which would mean we lose something if we decide that the musical record is complete.
Imagine if literature had ended in 1850. We would still have great literature. An unbelievable amount of it. But we would have no Beloved. No The Great Gatsby. No One Hundred Years of Solitude. No novels written from inside the strange experience of living through the twentieth century. Entire ways of seeing the world would be missing.
The old books would still speak to us.
They just couldn’t speak for us.
Maybe music works in a similar way.
Fine. Why Mine?
Of course this leads to an uncomfortable follow-up question.
Fine. Humanity should continue making music.
Why does it need mine?
There are millions of people doing a perfectly good job filling the historical archive without my help.
This is where the grand philosophical argument gets less useful.
“Yes, Brandon, humanity requires an ongoing artistic record of its changing historical consciousness.”
Excellent.
Apparently Billie Eilish has that covered. I can go back to Netflix.
But perhaps that misunderstands what the record is.
There isn’t one voice of a time.
There are millions.
A teenager writing beats in Lagos is making a different record than a film composer in Los Angeles or an old man playing folk songs in a village or someone sitting at a piano in Thailand wondering if there is any point in writing another piano piece.
This is something I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about, including in my book Formative Forces in Sound: An Exploration of Global Music Structures, where I looked at how different musical traditions build meaning out of very different assumptions about sound.
None of those replaces the others.
Still, I don’t want to slip too easily into the pleasant idea that every expression is equally valuable because every person is unique. Every grocery list is unique too. Uniqueness alone cannot be the answer.
Some music is bad.
Some is boring.
Some probably did not need to be recorded.
I have contributed to all three categories.
But perhaps a work does not have to justify its existence beforehand. That might be an impossible standard. If composers knew which works would matter before writing them, musical history would have been considerably more efficient.
Stravinsky thought of tradition not as the preservation of old methods but as something inherited that has to be made fruitful and passed on. Tradition continues precisely because people keep doing something with it.
The repertoire isn’t a warehouse we’re filling.
It is more like a conversation.
You don’t enter a conversation and say, “I’m sorry, but several people have already made excellent points, so apparently speaking is no longer necessary.”
You listen.
You inherit.
You answer.
Sometimes your answer is out of place.
Sometimes nobody hears it.
Sometimes somebody says something that changes the conversation.
But the fact that people spoke before you is the condition that makes your speaking possible, not the reason you should remain silent.
Music Is Not Inventory
John Cage approaches the problem from another direction. He described music as an “affirmation of life” and a way of waking ourselves up to the life we are actually living.
That sounds almost suspiciously inspirational when isolated as a quote, but I think there is something important behind it.
Maybe my original question treats music too much like a product.
Do we have enough music?
Enough units?
Enough files?
Enough songs stored on servers?
Christopher Small famously argued that music is not really a thing at all but an activity—something human beings do. His term “musicking” includes performing, listening, rehearsing, composing and dancing.
If that is even partly true, asking whether humanity has accumulated enough music becomes a little like asking whether we’ve accumulated enough conversations.
Maybe we have enough recorded conversations.
That doesn’t mean I don’t want to talk to my wife tomorrow.
And suddenly I start thinking about music differently.
Listening to Radiohead through headphones is great. But that isn’t the same thing as driving thirteen hours with your best friends to see Radiohead, then seeing the ocean at sunrise for the first time and having the whole experience somehow fuse together in your memory until years later you cannot separate the songs from the people or the road or the ocean.
A mosh pit with forty people crammed into somebody’s living room. Feeling a new music for the first time among a lot of sweaty strangers!
Sitting around a fire while someone strums the same three or four chords over and over and everybody looks up at the stars.
A religious ceremony.
A funeral.
A wedding.
A dad waking his kids up with some silly song he made up.
Someone whistling while working with their hands.
Two teenagers showing each other songs and, without saying it directly, communicating something important about who they are.
A person sitting alone at night listening to the same song over and over because, for whatever reason, that song is helping them stay alive.
I know music can do that – all of that!
Music can be trivial enough to accompany washing dishes and serious enough to become entangled with whether a person wants to continue living.
That is an astonishing range.
And those experiences cannot all be outsourced to Mozart. Maybe some can.
But we don’t listen to Mozart the way people in Mozart’s time listened to Mozart.
Whatever was startling in that music has been absorbed into hundreds of years of music that followed it. Things that once sounded strange become normal. A musical gesture can be worn down until a genuine expression becomes a cliché and then a cliché of a cliché.
That doesn’t destroy the original. But our relationship with the music changes.
This is one reason I don’t believe contemporary music has to reject beauty, consonance, melody, repetition, popular influence, or anything else merely to prove that it is new.
Novelty is not the same thing as contemporaneity.
A beautiful melody written now is not automatically pretending to live in 1890. It has been written by someone who has heard film music and video games and jazz and rock and hip-hop and electronic music and the hum of air conditioners and notification sounds and distorted guitars and orchestras recorded through microphones and a thousand other things Chopin could not have heard.
You cannot unknow your time.
Perhaps that is enough.
Ferruccio Busoni wrote more than a century ago that “Music was born free; and to win freedom is its destiny.” He thought Western music was still astonishingly young and its possibilities nowhere near exhausted.
A hundred years later, we have electronic music, synthesis, amplification, sampling, computers, spectral music, hip-hop, surround sound, algorithmic composition, bedroom producers, global hybrids that would have been impossible when he wrote those words.
So he seems to have been right about at least one thing.
We had not finished music. And we still haven’t.
Capitalism Has Entered the Chat
But I keep returning to the audience problem.
I don’t want to pretend I don’t care if anybody listens. I do. I want communication. If I write a piece that matters to me, I want it to leave the room. Maybe this is where I have confused scale with communication.
A piece heard by two hundred people has communicated with two hundred people. That does not mean all two hundred cared. Half may have clicked away after ten seconds. One may have been my mother.
But perhaps the only realistic way to build communication is to keep communicating.
Write another piece.
And another.
Create a body of work.
Put it into the world.
Some of it disappears.
Some of it reaches someone.
Maybe one piece unexpectedly travels farther than the others. Maybe decades later somebody finds something that was mostly ignored when it was written.
Or maybe none of that happens. I don’t particularly like that last possibility, but intellectual honesty probably requires leaving it on the table. There is no guarantee.
Art does not come with a promise that the amount of work invested will be returned as an equivalent amount of attention – or money!
That is particularly brutal in a capitalist system because attention and money are so tightly connected. Musicians are expected to spend years becoming good, create the work, promote the work, build a personal brand, make content about making the work, beg algorithms to show the work to people, ask for grants, sell tickets, and then remain appropriately grateful just for the opportunity.
Maybe the problem isn’t that there is too much music.
Maybe there is simply more music than our economic systems know how—or care—to support.
Those aren’t the same thing.
Human beings can produce an abundance of something culturally valuable while producing a terrible market for the people who make it.
And maybe I need to stop asking capitalism to tell me whether composition is philosophically worthwhile.
It can tell me whether it is profitable.
That is useful information.
It is not the same question.
Apparently Surviving Isn’t Enough
So what is the purpose?
Communication? Expression? Exploration? Money? Ritual? Pleasure? Historical record? Community? Healing?
Maybe the mistake is assuming music has to settle on one.
Some composers write because they want to explore sounds nobody has organized quite that way before. Some are trying to communicate an emotional experience. Some are scoring a video game. Some want people dancing in a club. Some are writing music to worship a god. Some want to become famous. Some need to pay rent. Some are writing because they genuinely seem unable not to.
Somebody somewhere is probably playing three chords because a child asked them to play a song.
Those activities don’t require the same justification.
And maybe “need” is too strong a word anyway.
Do humans need another piano piece?
Not the way we need water.
But a world organized strictly around that definition of need would be unbearable.
We don’t need novels. We don’t need paintings. We don’t need gardens arranged beautifully instead of efficiently. We don’t need to sing at funerals or tell stories around fires.
Yet humans keep doing these things across cultures and across history.
Apparently surviving has never been enough for us – or it was these activities that have helped us survive?
We want to give form to being alive.
And this brings me back to Copland.
“Art summarizes the most basic feelings about being alive.”
Maybe that is as close to an answer as I’m going to get.
Bach gave form to being alive in his world.
Schnittke did.
Mahler did.
Bill Evans did.
Tool did.
Thousands of musicians whose names disappeared from history did too.
And we are still alive.
Our time is still happening.
Our particular configuration of anxiety and love and technology and politics and stupidity and beauty has never happened before and will never happen again in exactly this form.
Some music from our time will survive.
Most of it will not.
That has always been true.
But the people living a hundred years from now deserve the possibility of hearing something of us just as we have the extraordinary privilege of hearing something of those who came before.
And we deserve music that belongs to us while we are here.
Not instead of Bach. Alongside him.
We need the old love song and we need someone to write another love song saying essentially the same thing because this particular person is in love now.
We need the old requiem and someone writing music for the dead now.
We need the ancient ritual and the frivolous song a father invents while waking up his kids.
We need the person banging on something in a living room with forty amped up teenagers around them.
We need people exploring sounds that annoy me.
And perhaps I need to write the music I think is good without worrying quite so much about whether the universe has filed the necessary paperwork establishing demand for another piano piece.
Maybe it reaches three people. (Hopefully more than three.)
Maybe it becomes part of a catalog that eventually communicates with hundreds or thousands.
Maybe nobody cares until long after I’m gone.
Maybe nobody cares at all.
But I’m beginning to think the uncertainty is not evidence that the act has no value. It is simply part of making something and releasing it into a world already overflowing with other people trying to say something too.
There is too much music to hear.
There are too many books to read.
There are too many paintings to see.
And somehow this abundance doesn’t make me want humanity to stop creating.
Quite the opposite.
It means an enormous number of people, separated by geography and history and language, have felt compelled to leave some evidence behind that they were here.
A sound.
A story.
A mark on a wall.
Something arranged where nothing had been arranged before.
I suppose I want to do that too.
So perhaps I should spend a little less time writing essays about whether I should write music and go write some music.
Brandon Alsup is the author of Formative Forces in Sound: An Exploration of Global Music Structures, an exploration of how musical cultures around the world organize pitch, rhythm, form, texture, and other elements of sound.
