Music To Impress

Writing music to impress is an essential stage of a composer’s development. You might need to impress your early supporters, your teachers, your classmates and colleagues. It’s an essential stage.

Let it be a stage.

The best music you’ll write is on the other side of that stage. When you become confident in your own sense of self and in your artistry, you will stop writing music that seeks to convince other people your music is of value.

You can still seek to move people. It’s right to think of your audience as you write music, and know what you want from the audience. Perhaps you want to make the audience cry, or to make them laugh, or to leave them inspired, emboldened, energized, or asleep.

Move your audience, yes. But I, for one, don’t want to spend my time with music written to impress. It’s often strangely devoid of actual emotion, with the compositional energy directed into showing off in any number of musical ways.