Musical Garden
What’s maturity?
If you read biographies of composers, you might see reference to a composer’s “mature” style or phase. I suppose this kind of thinking might make sense retrospectively when you have the full view of their career in mind. But is maturity a useful category for us living composers to apply to our own work?
When I was a student in college, I naturally didn’t worry about compositional maturity. I knew my studies were a time to grow and learn, and it wasn’t expected of me to be a mature composer. In the months after graduating, I assumed I would keep writing at the high rate I had been in college, so I felt that some kind of initial phase of maturity couldn’t be too far off.
Since then, though, I’ve had to take on other work, and over a period of years, my rate of writing fell off significantly. Now, I feel like the maturity I was once on the cusp of is even further away. Whatever I was progressing towards before now seems to be off the table.
When I sit down to write, it’s clear to me that I’m a very different person than I was when I graduated, bringing different assumptions, goals, and habits of thinking to the work. With so much changed, it feels necessary to completely rethink my approach to writing, so I feel much like a student again, having to learn from first principles again.
On the other hand, I do think I’ve matured in other ways over that time, in many non-musical ways that nonetheless feed back into how I approach music. I’m a student again, but hopefully a wiser student, with clearer intentions and a faster learning curve.
When it comes down to it, I don’t really know what compositional maturity means for me, whether I’ll ever reach it, or whether that’s even a useful way of describing my journey. But I think writing this post will help put to rest the concerns about that term lingering in the back of my mind.
Do you think about the concept of compositional maturity? How do you relate it to your own musical work? Let me know your thoughts at alex@musical.garden.