When I was in elementary school I tried writing songs and music from time to time, but I never really felt good about it. Because I hadn’t received any instruction, I was just going by trial and error and I was generally unhappy with the results. I became frustrated that I didn’t know how to write the music I heard in my head.

In my senior year of high school I decided to give it a shot again. There was a string quartet in residence at my school as well as a harpsichordist and we had regular soirées: opportunities for students to perform music and poetry. I decided to try writing a neo-baroque “harpsichord quintet” to be performed at one of these soirées although I had still received no training in composition. I had, however, learned and studied a lot more music as a pianist, trumpeter, singer, and general music-lover by that point, and I felt more confident than I had in elementary school. The high school conductor gave me one piece of advice with a little smirk: “Be sure to avoid parallel fifths.”

I didn’t know what that meant when he told me, but I made sure I found out. I won’t go into the theory of it, but in this case, composing using parallel fifths would have created a particular sound which is not appropriate in the Bach-like style I was aiming for. It was reasonable advice, although it was like telling someone who had decided to try woodworking for the first time to “be sure to keep their chisels sharp.” (This comes from another true story, which I’ll save for another time.) I needed far more constructive advice than the one warning: “avoid parallel fifths.” Even so, this composition was more successful, although honestly I remember very little about it except that it didn’t embarrass me, and I considered that to be a victory.

As a music major in college, I mostly composed within the context of music theory classes. There were many rules to absorb to ensure that we adhered to the style of music that we were studying. Composition became like a puzzle and I became so caught up with and nervous about all these rules that I was sure I could never possibly be a composer. My grades in music theory were average, and I didn’t find writing music for these classes to be particularly fun, so I stuck to my preconception that I would be a music historian and left composition and theory for the composers and theorists. As an undergraduate and later as a conservatory student, I did take some electronic composition classes as electives and enjoyed them thoroughly, but somehow the stigma I had given myself from the theory classes stuck. I thought I was decidedly not cut out to be a composer.

Almost a decade after those undergraduate theory classes, I was in graduate school for ethnomusicology and needed to fill requirements in Western music theory. At the time Mario Davidovsky, a composer whose early electro-acoustic compositions I admired (and for which he had received a Pulitzer Prize) had joined the faculty and I was able to arrange a semester of private lessons with him to fill part of my theory requirements. After some experimentation on both of our parts, I found a post-tonal style of composing that seemed to flow naturally from me. As with my high school experience, I was writing more-or-less from instinct, but this was an instinct shaped by even more years of exposure to music. Professor Davidovsky was impressed and told me I had potential. I won’t lie: I was flattered to receive such a compliment from someone like him! My lessons went well and he was able to help me shape my musical creations, but at the time I considered this to be a diversion, not my “serious” work. I didn’t feel any pressure to compose “correctly” because I was an ethnomusicologist, not a composer. I knew that if I were to change disciplines I would encounter all those rules about the right way and the wrong way, again fail to internalize them, and composition would turn back into a struggle. So, when the semester ended, so did my composing.

As I mentioned on Day 13 I left music when my children were born. What I haven’t talked much about yet, is how that was the natural consequence of my love for music being gradually drained away by the preceding years of “study” until I no longer cared much for it by the time I left my Ph.D. program. My one-year stint as the music director for a church helped to keep my passion on life-support, but it was a struggle. In the end, I threw music away with my academic career and focused on raising our newborns. Looking back, I think my head got in the way of finding the right relationship with music. A couple of years ago, someone looked at my relationship with music and challenged me to think of myself as a composer. I did, and my love of music sparked into flame. Shortly after, Jung learned of the Pacific Northwest Film Scoring Program (PNWFS) and I enrolled in their night course.

The approach to music theory for film scoring is completely different from how I had studied music theory previously. One of the earlier questions in the PNWFS class was, “What about parallel fifths?” Our instructor’s answer was, “Go ahead. Use them. They wont kill you.” That response changed the way I look at music and also the way I look at life now. I am learning a lot of rules about composing film music, but they aren’t dos and don’ts.” The rules are “if-then.” IF you write this way THEN it will have this effect.

In film scoring, the decisions a composer makes all need to answer the question, “What am I trying to evoke?” The purpose of the music which accompanies a scene is to support the scene in some way; often it highlights or colors one aspect or another of the on-screen action or emotion. Therefore, there is no “right” or “wrong.” There are conventions to understand, but at the end of the day, the success of the music arises from how it relates to the scene. Sometimes that means following all the rules to make the audience feel a sense of comfort. Sometimes it means breaking them to unsettle the viewers. Film composition highlighted the relative nature of “right and wrong” for me; even moreso with some of the hypothetical scenes we’ve had to score. Because we have no actual film in front of us, each of us students often imagine the scene to be quite different and so the music we each bring in to accompany the “same scene” can vary widely!

I have come to believe that being honest about what you want to express in life naturally leads to examining the “rules” that you always believed in. Some rules you may keep, but others you may find you need to discard in order to live an authentic, congruent life. In life, just like in film composition, I’ve found “if-then” rules to be much more useful than “dos and don’ts” for living an honest life. By living consciously I have been able to observe the consequences of what I think and do, and that has helped me to begin to compose the life that my whole self has been yearning to live.