Composer Advice

This is a twitter feed providing advice for composers of experimental music.

[Composer Advice @composeradvice]

It's amazing when you watch some improv and realize that there are twice the amount of ears on stage as there are players but there is no way you could tell that from listening.

[Composer Advice @composeradvice]

... then decided that producing a print magazine would be too expensive, so just made a website, then folded after only four issues (https://t.co/xUVwKXDW9w) and I still can’t work out how anyone could be so monumentally incompetent.

[Composer Advice @composeradvice]

You know, sometimes at nights I think of "Sounds Like Now" (@Sounds_Like_Now) – you know, the British publication for contemporary music that raised £18,788 in crowd funding (https://t.co/Hn5Xk4UvR4) in July 2016 to produce a bi-monthly printed and digital magazine ...

[Composer Advice @composeradvice]

@Braid_Ensemble wtf are you talking about?!

[Composer Advice @composeradvice]

Going to a contemporary music festival is an increasingly alienating experience, like being in an Indian restaurant and watching all the diners around you order course after course of dried poppadoms, constantly telling each other that it's the best food they've ever eaten...

[Composer Advice @composeradvice]

Contemporary music is a field filled with so many intelligent people... all of whom seem incapable of thinking intelligently about music.

[Composer Advice @composeradvice]

@house_apartment Stop serving.

[Composer Advice @composeradvice]

...occasionally dipping their desiccated starters in some trendy, spicy sauce to help flavor the blandness, whilst you look on, baffled, smelling the scents drifting out of the kitchen and aware that your fellow diners lack the capacity to even imagine what a main course could be

[Composer Advice @composeradvice]

For most musicians “excellent acoustics” is just a synonym for “something that sounds different to when I play the same thing in the rooms in my house”.

[Composer Advice @composeradvice]

Beware commercial interests.

(Images from https://t.co/oy161B4rDo)

[Composer Advice @composeradvice]

If you are a composer and you don't agree with a particular tweet I have posted, remember that the world would be greatly improved by you reading every one of my tweets with the prefix "Your music is shit because..."

[Composer Advice @composeradvice]

Just because you have conservative-sounding opinions does not mean you have conservative solutions to problems. I don't want a return to the music of the past, I want to raze the entire shitshow of Contemporary Music and start again.

[Composer Advice @composeradvice]

Listening to a piece full of new sounds is often like watching someone showing you their holiday photos - presenting all the interesting places they discovered on their travels - and attendant with all the self-absorption, formlessness and tedium that this normally entails.

[Composer Advice @composeradvice]

Too many composers avoid tackling the hard problem of music "how do I create syntactic relationships between sounds to create a meaning that arises out of sound itself" in favour of easy the off-the-shelf answers by importing meaning generators from other disciplines.

[Composer Advice @composeradvice]

Music isn't about sound in the same way that novels aren't about phonemes and soccer isn't about gravity.

[Composer Advice @composeradvice]

Book reviews don't praise novels for "inventing a lot of new words", so why should I be impressed with your newest extended-technique-athon?

[Composer Advice @composeradvice]

Realize that it is not that you are too stupid to understand the typesetting software lilypond, but that its syntax is not consistent or logical and that someone needs to build a simplified css-style parsing language for the layout settings.

[Composer Advice @composeradvice]

https://t.co/0QUCynzVXi