Last night I was interviewed at Lowther Hall Anglican Grammar School in Essendon, Victoria. The following is a list of the questions I was asked and my answers.
Who or what inspired you to take up composing, and pursue a career in music?
For me, choosing music as a career was an easy decision to make because music was always the thing I was most passionate about. From a very young age, I pestered my parents into letting me learn the piano and the violin, and I desperately wanted to play and sing in as many choirs, orchestras and ensembles as humanly possible.
But growing up, I never actually wanted to be a composer. When I was a child, I wasn’t interested in how music was made or who wrote the music I was playing. I just knew that I loved playing it and how it made me feel. I also knew that most of the music I had to play had been written by white men who had died a long time ago, so it never really occurred to me that I could write my own music myself.
But when I was studying violin performance at university, I was struggling too much with performance anxiety, so I had to give up performance and find something else to focus on and I thought I’d give composition a go. Before my second year at Uni, I hadn’t had much experience with writing my own music, so I feel like it was incredibly lucky that I ended up loving it.
What comes first when you are composing – Melody, rhythm, or harmony.
There are so many ways to approach writing a piece of music. Some people choose a particular mode or scale to work with, or a particular selection of notes or chords. Some people use mathematical equations or very strict rules or structures to decide how to write their music. I have tried so many different methods to write music over the years, but the approach I tend to settle on is to just play one of my instruments and to write down what feels good or sounds good to me at the time. For me this usually begins with melody and rhythm, as these two things seem to naturally go together. Then I can decide if I want to harmonise my melody with another voice or another instrument.
What is your favourite instrument to compose for, and why?
My favourite instruments to compose for are strings and piano. I often love to play the music I am composing as I am composing it, especially when I am just starting a new piece and as the violin and the piano are the instruments that I play, I get a huge amount of enjoyment out of composing for these instruments. Once you have written for one instrument, it is often easy to arrange the same piece of music for another instrument. Knowing how to play the piano is a huge advantage if you want to be a composer as you can see all the notes represented in front of you and you can easily play more than one note at a time, so I will often use the piano to help me compose for many different instruments.
Who are your favourite composers?
I’m not going to tell you who my favourite composers are because we will be here all night and I think that unless you know the names of the composers I mention, they will be meaningless to you, and they may not stick in your memory. Instead, I want to encourage you to try and discover who your own favourite composers are for yourself. Explore with your teachers what music makes you feel good when you play it, or which pieces you enjoy listening to. And remember, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks about who your favourite composers are, or which pieces of music you like to play, as everyone’s tastes are different.
What I will tell you is that for me, the most important thing about music is its ability to help people to connect with their emotions. My own music has been influenced by all kinds of genres and eras of music. I wonder if any of you were able to pick the composers that influenced my piece “Snow Rising”?
What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?
One of the biggest challenges is that writing music isn’t the only thing a composer needs to do if they want their music to be heard. If you want to be a composer, you also often need to be a publicist, marketer, grant writer, concert organiser, website manager, public speaker and social media expert. All these extra roles don’t always allow for that much time to actually write music. A lot of the extra behind the scenes stuff isn’t easy or fun, especially if you’re not naturally drawn to self-promotion, but if you really love writing music, you will find ways to make things work.
Would you like to share any important ideas or advice with the young musicians here today?
Don’t worry about what other people will think of your compositions or your performance. If you love what you’ve written or the music you’re performing, that feeling will come through in its performance. Focus on writing or playing music that lights you up, excites you, and makes you feel good.
Don’t change something that you’ve written to make others happy if it doesn’t feel right to you. You are your own most important critic, and you will never be able to please everyone. If you change what you love about your music to please others, your music stops being truly yours and becomes a reflection of someone else instead, so don’t be afraid to be true to who you really are and what you really love.
Can you tell us about what inspired you to write Snow Rising?
I was quite young and still new to composing when I wrote Snow Rising. I wrote it as a dedication to the mother of one of my best friends, who had passed away from cancer. It was the first time someone close to me had died, and I wanted to do something to help my friend feel less alone. Snow Rising was my way of honouring Alison McKie’s memory and showing my friend that I was thinking of her.
