Waiting for inspiration

I’ve been reading Aaron Copland’s book What to Listen for in Music and this one paragraph stuck out to me.

“Someone once asked me, in a public forum, whether I waited for inspiration. My answer was: “Every day!” But that does not, by any means, imply a passive waiting around for the divine afflatus. That is exactly what separates the professional from the dilettante. The professional composer can sit down day after day and turn out some kind of music. On some days it will undoubtedly be better than on others; but the primary fact is the ability to compose. Inspiration is often only a by-product.”

It stood out to me because this is what being a composer means to me. Writing music. It might not always be good music or music that you’re proud of or music that you want to release, but writing music is the main thing that needs to be done.

And just that act of writing music will lead to that music being good.

How can you ever learn to write music if you never write music?

Writing music is the practice that you need. You get better at playing piano and guitar by playing both of those instruments so you get better at writing music by writing music. Maybe you throw away a lot of the ideas. I’ve definitely done that. I’ve written music and thrown it in the trash or forgotten it or just moved on because I didn’t think it was any good. But I still wrote it. I got the ideas out and moved on.

Not all the music you write has to be good right away. You just need to be able to curate it and pick and choose the parts that are worth releasing and worth putting out into the world. And eventually, you’ll get better at doing that.

It’s also encouraging as a composer to hear someone like Aaron Copland say that. Inspiration is a by-product. Inspiration is not this magical thing that you need to get started.

Start. Then maybe you’ll get inspired.

I’ve definitely noticed that in my own music. Some days I’ll just say to myself, “I want to make a track.” So I’ll sit at my keyboard and play around until I find something cool and expand on it and use that for the track. I have two songs coming out next year called “Powerless” and “Caffeinated” and I wasn’t inspired when I wrote them. I just wanted to write some music and got inspired in the process.

Hopefully you can do the same.

ISJ