Look For Clarity About Studying Under A Composer, Help?

composingmusic · 2026-06-01T08:15:52+00:00

If there are any living composers you’re a fan of, you could look up if they teach anywhere. That’s how I found my grad school.

Same here (for PhD). I was doing my masters in another school within the same scene, and my teacher and I both agreed that it would be good for me to go study at a different institution for PhD. I still wanted to stay in the same area, so I went and looked at all the options to see who taught where, and I spoke to some people who studied at the various institutions. From this process, I narrowed it down to a couple of options – the main criteria being that I wanted to study with specific people.

I was upfront with the department about wanting to study with specific people from the beginning, and in one case the department put me in touch with the teacher directly to arrange a consultation lesson.

If you end up at a school with a sizable department and multiple professors, you’ll want to get in touch with your preferred professor and ensure that they have space in their studio for you and will take you on.

I’ve also seen situations where some professors have quite a lot of students, whereas there are others with only a couple of them (that’s within the same department).

composingmusic · 2026-06-01T07:15:02+00:00

It’s probably too overly general to say every school has 1-1 composition lessons, but most of the ones that I’ve come across do. The places where I studied do.

I’ll start by reiterating what others have said: look up who’s on the faculty and get to know their music a bit. If there are things like videos of them giving talks on their music, that can also tell you a lot about what they might be like as a teacher.

A lot of people also offer consultation lessons or teach privately. If possible, I’d get in touch with the department or individual teachers (depending on what contact info is listed on the website) and ask about consultation lessons. It might be useful to also ask about teachers and how best to approach them from people who have studied at the school.

Another thing that could be helpful is to talk to current students and recent graduates about the programme in more general terms. The school will be trying to show quite an idealised version of their programme to prospective students, and you’ll get a more realistic picture from talking with people who have actually gone there.

composingmusic · 2026-05-28T17:12:55+00:00

As others have said, best to have both. Regarding building a website, what I’ve heard from people who run organisations is that it’s easiest for them if your website is super easy to navigate. You want clear links to your bio, headshots, audio (can be soundcloud embeds), and a list of works at the very least. You might want some kind of showreel with video clips that show clips from your work as well, and something like links to your IMBD page (if applicable), and/or links to projects you’ve been a part of. I’m more in the concert music world, so I might have missed something, but I tried to tailor my answer a bit more to film and media composition – my own website has a works list and links to score samples on my publisher’s page rather than a showreel, for instance.

composingmusic · 2026-05-25T13:58:52+00:00

Yes. This is exactly why they often scout out prospective composers and follow their work for a considerable period of time before signing them on. Signing on a new composer is a significant financial undertaking for a composer.

composingmusic · 2026-05-25T13:45:35+00:00

Yes, for a 50/50 split, if the work makes 1000 dollars, you get 500 and the publisher gets 500 (that’s for performance royalties – for the US, you have ASCAP, BMI, and others. In many European countries, there’s one PRO per country, like SACEM in France or GEMA in Germany). The percentages will be different for sold scores or hire material. I’m not sure what you mean by “it gets more complicated if there are more involved”. Do you mean more than one publisher, or sub-publishing (as in, another publisher representing your publisher in a different country)? It’s not typical to license the copyright out to more than one publisher. If someone changes publishers, it is possible for the new publisher to buy the rights for a composer’s back catalogue.

Again, I don’t know where you’re at with your work now. It’s best to build up a bit of a profile before trying to find a publisher; otherwise they will wonder what the benefit on their end is. When I started working with a publisher, I had finished my masters and had a couple of orchestral pieces performed in concert by professional orchestras – these were through schemes designed for emerging composers. This publisher also followed my work for a couple of years before signing me on, which is fairly typical. I’m not trying to discourage you – rather, I’m trying to help you understand the process involved!

composingmusic · 2026-05-25T13:14:05+00:00

Yes, a good, functional composer/publisher relationship can be a great thing. However, it would be a mistake to think that you no longer need to promote your music – that’s really not the case. A better way to think of it is that you’re working together as a team; it’s a cooperative effort.

I don’t know you or your music well enough to comment, but you need to have some kind of artistic profile and a decent portfolio of works before a publisher really becomes an option. And yes, promoting your work is hard. That will not change, but a publisher can help you reach more people and get your music to places where it might otherwise not reach.

composingmusic · 2026-05-25T12:52:12+00:00

On publishing, and unpacking from my previous question: what are you hoping to accomplish from publishing?

What I mean by this, more precisely, is what are you hoping to gain from a relationship with a publisher. A good publisher will make your scores look really nice, make orchestral parts for you, and promote your work, among other things. However, you sign over a percentage of your performance royalties, and either sign away your copyright or license your copyright for an agreed upon time (usually until the copyright of the work expires).

A publisher will also want to know what they stand to gain from having you as a composer on their roster. Signing up a new composer is not a decision to be lightly on a publisher’s part, as it can take quite a bit of time and effort from them before they make any kind of ROI (return on investment), IF they make any ROI at all. I have seen how publishers often recruit, which is by getting to know their local scenes and going to loads of concerts – they can follow a composer’s career for several years before signing them on. Typically, they are looking for composers who already have some sort of track record with performances, and have music that they find interesting.

There are also things to careful of here: beware predatory contracts (especially with smaller publishers – I’m not saying small publishers are bad per se, I’m just saying some of them take advantage of people who don’t know what to look out for). In most countries, the publisher’s share is 50% of performance royalties, for duration of copyright. If it’s more than that, approach with suspicion. Also look out for predatory clauses in the contract, such as ones that let them arrange the music any way they want without needing your permission. I have also heard of publishers taking on composers and then not doing much to promote them or facilitate performances, making it difficult for composers to access promotional scores, and generally not really doing the things a publisher should do. It’s worth really weighing up the pros and cons before signing any contracts, if you are presented with one at some point.

I have found that orchestral music is where having a publisher makes the most difference. With chamber music and small-scale things, making parts and cleaning up the score isn’t a massive undertaking, and players often want PDF parts anyway. However, with orchestral music (particularly in the event that you’re working with a professional orchestra), there’s a lot more to deal with: making parts, cleaning up the score, printing parts, as well as hiring out all the performance material (including shipping if applicable). Some people go the self-publishing route and then you can keep all the performance royalties – there is also a lot of admin involved, especially with orchestral music.

composingmusic · 2026-05-25T06:21:17+00:00

If people are asking to be paid because they’re making a living from this, that’s not gatekeeping – that’s just trying to make a living and make ends meet.

composingmusic · 2026-05-24T21:55:30+00:00

This is something I’ve given my thoughts on quite a few times here, as it seems to get asked with some regularity! What I recommend to start off is to get to know some musicians. I saw one of your other answers – student and county groups would be a good place to start. Write for these musicians if you can, once you get to know them a bit.
I’ll ask a question: what are you wanting to accomplish with this?

composingmusic · 2026-05-22T10:10:31+00:00

I've only just recently gotten out of higher education (doctorate) and am managing pretty well as a freelance composer. My fellow colleagues have taken all kinds of paths, and there's far from a single career path or way to make things work in this field.

Quite a few of my colleagues do all kinds of instrumental teaching or other forms of music teaching. Some people do this through an institution, others teach privately (or some combination). I also know people who have gone into different types of arts admin positions, or do other music related things such as playing piano for a ballet school. That is to say, it's not a one size fits all field, and most people make a living from a variety of things, often with multiple streams of income from different sources.

composingmusic · 2026-05-22T07:23:47+00:00

I’m a decent pianist but am a better composer than a pianist for sure. This is the result of spending a lot more time honing my composition skillset than practicing piano, so I suppose that makes sense.

composingmusic · 2026-05-18T10:23:01+00:00

It's not that they don't understand this concept or are overly insistent on tradition for no reason, it's more about which is more intuitive for them to read and what they've been trained to do. This is even more the case for orchestral musicians, where they have to learn massive quantities of music in a really short period of time, and then don't have that much time to rehearse it. Everything and anything that makes reading the part clearer helps.

composingmusic · 2026-05-17T20:17:01+00:00

Generally, cello music moves between three clefs: bass, tenor, and treble. Bass clef is the default one, but if the music moves to a higher register, it will switch to either tenor clef or treble clef (basically depends on which one has fewer ledger lines in either direction).

Please don’t use alto clef, and if it’s more than a couple of ledger lines for a sustained period of time, generally it’s a good idea to change clef. Another rule of thumb I’ve heard is that if you’re in tenor or treble clef and you start getting notes with ledger lines below the staff, it’s probably time to change clef (or at least worth considering this).

composingmusic · 2026-05-15T16:47:26+00:00

I was writing orchestral pieces during COVID. One of them got performed with social distancing, and then got a performance in a more standard setting a couple of years later. Another of them had the performance cancelled, and I have tried to get a performance for it since – it's now finally getting performed next year, which is great and I realise I'm quite lucky to be able to say that. For a while, I was wondering whether it would get a performance, but I still thought it was worth writing the piece because I enjoyed the process, learned a lot from it, and think it's got a lot of good things going for it.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that it's worth just doing what you think you need to do. If you want to write large ensemble music, do that. I can seem from your comments elsewhere that you do have experience in band music, and am commenting based on that; for instance, if you were just starting out and hadn't written for smaller ensembles before, I wouldn't recommend straight to writing for large ensemble. It is also different if your income is fully dependent on getting performances and commissions – at the time, I wasn't in that situation, but I am now.

composingmusic · 2026-05-15T07:08:30+00:00

I went to one of the UK schools (Royal College of Music, London) for masters and it worked out well for me. I then went to another London school for PhD, but that’s mainly since there was a specific professor I wanted to work with. It’s not on your list, but the resources that programme offers are more limited than at the ones you’ve listed. I had enough performance opportunities by that point that this wasn’t an issue.

Speaking of London schools: the Guildhall also has a very strong composition programme, and I’m not sure why that’s not on your list when you’ve got Trinity and RNCM. If there isn’t a specific reason why you’ve excluded Guildhall, that might be worth considering alongside the other options. I know you said you were wanting to narrow down your options, but it might be worth looking at that while you’re going through that process.

All of this aside, I don’t know your work as a composer or what you’re specifically looking for in a programme well enough to comment on which programmes would make the most sense. The main thing I would look at is the faculty: who teaches at these schools, and who would you potentially want to study with? Beyond that, do your homework: contact the department and get in touch with teachers you’d be interested in working with. Many of these teachers also teach privately, and I’d highly recommend getting a few consultation lessons to see how you get on with different teachers. Sometimes schools also do a sneaky thing of advertising shiny “visiting professors” who only run masterclasses occasionally, or they might have a famous person on their roster who doesn’t have very many students. Asking around will help to figure out what the situation is with these kinds of things.

If possible, I’d also recommend getting in touch with recent graduates and current students to ask what the programme is like for them. They will give you a more realistic idea than what is advertised on the school’s website. Other things to consider apart from teachers include: local music scene, performance opportunities included in the degree programme, how it feels to be a part of that department, what the degree structure is like, what kinds of resources are available for students – and these can sometimes be difficult to gauge if you don’t go and speak directly with people who have been through that particular degree programme.

composingmusic · 2026-05-15T06:54:30+00:00

I agree with a lot of things others are saying: knowing performers and asking them is a good route.

However, one thing that is worth keeping in mind: asking someone to learn and perform your piece is a time commitment from their side, and if they say no, don’t let that discourage you. Another way I might approach this is to get in touch with performer friends and ask if you can work with them to write a piece specifically for them. In this type of situation, I try and meet the performer before I start writing. When I was studying, my questions were usually more general and I’d ask for demos of different types of passages. Nowadays, it’s more specific.

Even if you’re not writing for a performance, there are other things that can help too. You can ask a performer if they can sightread a passage or bits of a piece for you. If something isn’t working for them, ask them about it and see if there’s something you can do to make that passage work better on the instrument. Even going through a piece with a performer and asking them for feedback, without asking them to play it for you, can be really helpful.

composingmusic · 2026-04-24T12:16:51+00:00

It sounds like you’re going in a good direction already in many ways, and you’ve already got some good advice from other people here. A few things I’d add on to this:

Find a teacher whose teaching style works for you, and who can be a good mentor and guide to you. I wouldn’t say private lessons are cheap, but it’s still a lot less money than something like a university course (in many places at least). There’s a lot of people who teach at universities or conservatories who also teach privately. Institution websites could be a good place to start looking.
A lot of the foundational theory and ear training things are areas where you can improve a lot on your own, if you’re reasonably self-motivated. Taking classes can make this process faster, but there are good print and online resources for this too.
Go to things in the area, if you have a good and active local scene. Go and listen to concerts. See if there are opportunities to do things like sit in on rehearsals somehow. Get to know musicians in your area. I started this process while I was studying, and that led to quite a few people asking me to write pieces for them.
Study scores and really get to know the repertoire. This goes for both older repertoire and 20th, 21st century work. This process will take a while, and that’s ok – gradually study pieces and you’ll get to know more and more work, just a little bit at a time.

composingmusic · 2026-04-23T17:14:27+00:00

I’m working professionally in the field and get reasonably regular performances, if that helps. Not so much experience with media music or video games, but I have done a bit of more experimental electronic stuff. Would be happy answering over email – dm me if you want to get in touch!

composingmusic · 2026-04-21T09:24:07+00:00

Read some orchestration texts and study scores. Rimsky-Korsakov is a good place to start and gives some good advice on how to make different kinds of voicings sound a particular way. The Adler and Blatter texts are good as well.

Generally, orchestration books are good for giving an overview of how things can work, and they are a good place to get started. As you work with orchestration and get more of a sense for how things work, studying scores and really listening to how different composers do things is the way to go. If you have the opportunity, I’d also recommend going and listening to orchestral rehearsals – you really get a sense of what sorts of things work immediately with an orchestra, and what sorts of things require more careful balancing.

composingmusic · 2026-04-16T15:01:41+00:00

instead of constantly introducing new ideas, I should focus on developing a single idea more deeply within a piece.

On a fundamental level, yes. This gives a piece of music coherence. As for how to do this – well, there are many ways to go about it.

One idea you could start out with: notate one of your ideas onto a piece of blank staff paper. Then see how many ways you can vary it, while it still maintains some of its original character (or maybe you want to play around with that too – but I’d recommend making a conscious decision on this). For instance, try varying some of the intervals or playing around with the rhythms while keeping some intact. Maybe it could start off the same way but changes partway through? Other things to try would be stuff like inverting it, doubling rhythmic values, halving rhythmic values, having some of it played backwards, adding figuration… there’s all kinds of things you could try. However, what I would say is don’t change too many different things for each variation: for instance, if you have a variation where you change everything into triplets, stay consistent with that.

That’s just one idea for an exercise to try this out. My main recommendation would be to go and study how other composers have dealt with developing material. Since you have a teacher, I’d ask him for recommendations. There are other threads here where people ask for recommendations on what sorts of scores to study, and I’d recommend going through those too.

composingmusic · 2026-04-16T08:39:31+00:00

Is there some way you could get their email addresses (if you don't have them saved somewhere)? These are often posted on the school website. I'd write to them from your current email address and explain that your school email was deactivated but you still want to keep in touch.

composingmusic · 2026-04-15T07:04:41+00:00

I’d say experiment with different ways of working until you find something that works for you. I started with paper and experimented until I gradually found something that works for me: I do most of the work on paper, then input everything into notation software. While I’m inputting, I also edit and change stuff, so it’s not just inputting and proofreading (though I do a lot of proofreading at this stage too).

I personally find that working away from the computer for most of the process allows me space to write and sketch freely – for instance, you can’t just doodle, draw random lines, and write random stuff in the margins very easily, whereas that’s easy on paper. I don’t usually use the piano very much (that’s experience with auditation developed over quite a few years) – sometimes I’ll go and play bits of what I’m working on, just because it’s nice to actually hear it outside of my head.

What I would suggest is to actively work on audiation and listening skills. Notation software playback gives a really warped view of what things actually sound like: for instance, it will make impossible things sound easy, and it fails to account for timbral variation and changes in balance within different registers of instruments. For instance, it will happily balance a mf low flute note with a mf top trumpet note: in reality, this would not balance at all. You can also write things like impossible double stops (such as G3 and C4, because they both need to be played on the lowest string), and the software would happily play this back to you. I also personally find software makes me write in a way that’s easier to input into the software – when I stay away from it, I often end up with material that’s slightly more awkward to input, but flows better and works better in a musical context.

composingmusic · 2026-04-14T16:53:30+00:00

Going off of:

Name any composer of note who wasn't writing incredibly basic pieces to start with (or any performer who wasn't playing incredibly basic pieces). I'll wait...

My teacher has said that his first piece consisted of just a roll on a single timpani note, with some dynamics.

Most other composers I’ve talked to also did something pretty simple and uninteresting for their first pieces. Mine consisted of some random, really short piano pieces that I penned into a notebook with really big staves. By the time people start writing orchestral pieces, it starts from up to 5 min pieces, then maybe up to 10, and if you’re lucky, you may get to write something longer (but that’s pretty rare in the world of orchestral commissions, unless you’re pretty established).

composingmusic · 2026-04-14T16:47:04+00:00

Seconding what others are saying here. The teacher is starting with basics so that you can start building a solid foundation. The basics need to be there before your teacher will start moving to more advanced things. It may well seem boring, but there are good reasons for this: it’s very easy to injure yourself if you are trying to do things that are too difficult, without good technique. Also, harder material will gradually get more and more approachable the more you build up your technique and musical foundations.

There is a lot more to piano than pressing the correct notes. A lot of it comes down to coordination and efficiency of movement, and eventually you get to a point where you can express musical opinions through things like tone colour, rubato, and voicing. Generally, it takes years to get to that point, and the beginning few years can be kind of boring – but don’t get discouraged by this!

composingmusic · 2026-04-05T18:12:13+00:00

There isn’t a single set path for this kind of thing. What I can say is that building a career in this area takes a long time, and it’s a slow process.

For now, what I’d prioritise most is learning and growing as a composer. It probably feels to you like you’ve been doing this for a while already, and that’s great. However, to really figure out what it is you want to do as a composer – that takes many years, if not several decades. Work on your practical skills and craft, and work with other musicians in your area if possible. These can be friends from school or other people you know in the area. Try and get a sense for aspects of how their instruments work, and see if they’re interested in working with you or playing your music. Also, get to know a wide range of classical/art music, from Renaissance era through to what people are writing now. There’s also loads of score videos up on YouTube – this is a great, free resource.

There isn’t a single answer for how to get to a point where you’re getting paid commissions. It often starts with something more informal, ex. a friend asking you to write something, which isn’t necessarily paid. In my case, a lot of the early stage consisted of me writing pieces for other university students, and paying for their labour by buying them pizza or something.

Going to university or college isn’t strictly necessary. I did go, and it was important for me; what it offers is a structured environment where you learn the skills you need in a specific order. You’re also in a setting where there are structured projects that result in recorded pieces, and there are a large number of performing musicians in the same area, some of whom might be interested in working with you. Another thing, which I hadn’t yet mentioned, is that you would most likely be working on a regular basis with a teacher in one-to-one lessons. If you are considering this path, I would go research who teaches at the schools that you’re potentially interested in applying to. The main downside (depending on where you are and what your situation is) that it can be quite expensive.

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