Back to writing music

A very interesting article on Guardian about writing music, an art that many musicians are forgetting.

Writing and performing music once went hand in hand. If we want to be better musicians, we need to revive the lost art of composition

Jacob Lateiner, the great American pianist and teacher, used to tell his students that they should write music every day. If not their own, then they should copy out someone else's. He felt that the physical act of a hand guiding a scratching pencil across paper was a vital part of a person's musical life, and that it would naturally lead to their fingers depressing the keys with more intelligence and care.

By the end of the second world war, with a few exceptions, composers no longer played their own instrumental compositions, and few instrumentalists wrote. The ideal of specialisation, with its closed shop and the resulting displacement between creator and performer, had become the norm.

Read the whole article by Stephen Hough on Guardian Unlimited