Composer's Composers

As someone who became a composer late in life (though I have always done a bit of composing throughout my career), I am always discovering new things about this activity. One of them is noticing how some composers are particularly interesting to other composers. I don't necessarily mean influential, though this may be the case, instead I refer to certain qualities that some composers have that tend to attract the interest of other composers.

Here are some examples: Domenico Scarlatti, J. S. Bach and Joseph Haydn. What these three composers did that is of particular interest to other composers was to take up a particular style or genre and explore in great depth, all the possibilities it offered. This is a kind of pure creativity that is quite rare. Instead of the idea that creativity consists in exploring all the areas, materials and genres, this concept of creativity suggests that you define particular boundaries and work within them.

The 1960s were a time when the idea was popular that a composer might be best advised to throw everything including the kitchen sink into a piece. It was the era of "happenings" and "multi-media" and long, self-indulgent pieces that often are unlistenable today. The idea of focussing on one particular medium or style is to go in the opposite direction.

As an extreme example, Domenico Scarlatti wrote sonatas for the harpsichord in two repeating sections and kept doing it until he had written five hundred and fifty-five of them. To a composer this is an astonishing feat because not one of these pieces is boring! The pieces are fairly short, ranging between two and six minutes long, but while they all have a similar structure, every single one is different. This is an astonishing compositional feat.

The symphonies of Joseph Haydn are another example. There are one hundred and six and again, while they share a certain structural similarity he solves the problems of variety and unity differently in every one.

And, of course, Bach. I started out doing a post on each of the preludes and fugues from book one of the Well-Tempered Clavier on the supposition that looking at them as a whole would reveal just how remarkably different they all are, even though they all stay within the boundaries of the style and genre. The idea of taking up the same basic problem and doing it in every different major and minor key is the kind of thing that is fascinating to a composer.

Another remarkable thing is that, over time, all this music has become very popular with general audiences. I think this is simply because, in the long run, quality will out.

The only way to really realize just how remarkable these compositional projects are is to go through them, having a close look at each piece in turn. I did that with a lot of the Haydn symphonies a few years ago and now am doing it with Bach. But I don't think I will do it with the Scarlatti sonatas! Just too darn many of them...

Here is Scott Ross playing a hundred of the Scarlatti sonatas: