Brandon Nelson
IMAGO DEI
Category: Philosophy
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My Roots and First Steps in Composition The setting for our story: almost the exact middle of the upper peninsula of Michigan; small town, working class rust belt community with a community music tradition. I started composing when I was 11 (around the time I joined the school band). David Dagenais was my first band…
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Any passage within a piece of music, I think it may be agreed, can be classified in one of four ways: expository, transitional, developmental, or terminal. This represents a basic macrostructural analytic viewpoint. It can be valuable to hear, create, and analyze music on those terms. However, in my view, there are many pieces in…
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I don’t remember ever “becoming” a composer. I’ve always felt the inner push to write down musical ideas and it’s an impulse I’ve always been happy to follow. It’s always seemed logical and natural to me, then, to invest the better part of my life in pursuit of the profession. My young adulthood was spent getting two…
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From a practical standpoint, the field of composition is not well-defined. There is no formal path laid out for the practitioner. Seniority isn’t necessarily rewarded, and neither, for that matter, merit. (Indeed, who would define “merit” and how would they do it?) There is no predetermined ladder for one to climb once one graduates from…
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In the midst of the Baroque, Johann Fux found himself in a troubling position. He was a composer in a time when conventions of music were vague and composers were regarded as expendable. That is why he took it upon himself to write a treatise on the craft of composition, for he felt that if…
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Music education seems to live in a perpetual state of conflict and controversy. Educators have for decades been barraged with questions about the educational value of music and whether it is prudent, in lean fiscal times, to spend tax dollars on a supposedly frivolous subject. Even those within the field seem at times beset with…
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Innovation is the key to artistic achievement. Indeed, the history of the arts can be seen as a continuous attempt at creative evolution—to forge something new in order to stir hearts and minds. For more than a century, there has been a dualistic current running through the arts in regard to creating innovate works: Modernism…
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Here’s how my income sources broke down last year: The Day Gig: 57% Composing (commissions, sales): 18% Conducting: 23% Performance: 2% My “day gig” was working part time at a preschool. It was fun, interesting work and I even occasionally got to use some of my music training, but it hardly qualified as a…
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It’s not uncommon to hear people say (and maybe you’re one of them) “oh, that [John Williams/other famous composer] is so unorignial! He just steals from other composers!” I have a dirty little secret: we all do in some way. Does that make us all hacks and charlatans? Hardly. The reality is, there simply isn’t…
Brandon Nelson 