Resonate Magazine | Australian Music Centre

Image: Tim Hansen  
© Karen Steains

When I was 10, like zillions of kids before me, I was assigned Bach's Minuet in G to practise by my piano teacher. He was a very nice man, a retired Anglican priest called Mr Smee who would show up at our house in Orange, NSW, in an old blue beat-up Holden ute, direct me to play this or that piece of music, and then, more often than not, promptly fall asleep in the chair next to me. I can't say for certain that this was directly responsible for my terrible sight reading, but I quickly learned that if I started the piece okay and then just kind improvised some sort of harmonically satisfactory conclusion, he would usually wake up shortly after, mildly startled that I had finished, and say something to the effect of 'well done, very good… er… yes…' And that would be that.

One time, however, I was caught out. Bach's Minuet in G. With hindsight perhaps I'd grown a little cocky, but I was young and loved learning things by ear, and had recently taught myself to play 'Shave and a haircut, two bits'. It sounded perfectly fine to me but must have rung some deep-down alarm bell in the comatose Mr Smee because he woke up immediately and berated me for having the gall to tamper with great art.

By then it was probably too late: my sight reading was (and remains to this day) atrocious, and learning music was always extremely tedious. But making it up - that was a piece of cake. And no one could tell me it was wrong because it was my music. (Well, Bach wasn't, obviously. But it was my idea to end it like a vaudeville show tune).

The problem was that no one around me seemed to think that composing was a legitimate way to engage with music. My otherwise very supportive parents would despair that I wasn't practising, I was just mucking around on the piano and making tunes up. In Year 7 music class I played a piece I wrote and a kid gleefully accused me - and I use the word 'accuse' deliberately - of 'not playing a real piece of music'. When I was 15 I was chewed out by a teacher for writing a cello part that was too hard. That seemed unfair and unreasonable to me. How was I to know how to write for cello? I didn't even know the instrument existed until earlier that year.

With hindsight, I realise the problem was basically one of geography: I lived in a country town, pre-internet, and, as far as I'm aware, there wasn't a composer living within fifty kilometres of Orange. Don't get me wrong, by the time I hit Year 12, I had great music teachers, and the best thing I did for my HSC music assessment was a gloriously camp piece of music theatre I wrote about a witch à la Mae West's 'Come up and see me some time'. But I still remember feeling frustrated because no one could see just how much writing music meant to me, and certainly no one around had the faintest idea how to start teaching it to me.

So I was a late bloomer when it came to my music education. Until I started my music undergrad at age 23, I'd never heard of Schoenberg or Xenakis or Stravinsky or even Elena Kats-Chernin. I devoured music scores, pored over them like they were the Dead Sea Scrolls, took copious amounts of notes, listened to obscure recordings of avant-garde composers from the '60s in the library. Until then, the only music I'd ever really heard had been top-40 pop and musicals. It was a complete revelation. And I remember thinking, 'why didn't anyone tell me about this stuff?!'

That was a while ago now. I've been teaching composition for eight years, and my approach has always been to teach what I wish someone taught me when I was 16. On social media, I'm pretty vocal about the importance of music generally and composition specifically in high school education, and I guess I must have posted something about it in the right space, because in March 2014 I was approached by the brand-new US-based music education website Soundfly to create some lessons on composition. I was honoured by their offer, and of course I said yes: give me six months.

More than two years later I'm thrilled-slash-relieved to say the lessons are finally finished. And at the core of the lessons are what I wish someone had taught me in my mid-teens. In effect, they're aimed at late high school/early college students who love music and want to learn more about composition but haven't had exposure to contemporary art music. I've broken it into two parts: the first part covers compositional practice and how to teach yourself to write your own music (I believe that no one can truly 'teach' you how to compose - they can only offer technical advice and an outside ear - but ultimately you have to teach yourself how to do it), while the second part - the part that is essentially the 16-year-old-me shouting, 'and show them this! Oh! And this too!' - is the basic elements of music supported by contemporary works that use those elements as a key compositional tool.

I feel that one of the most important decisions I made about these lessons is that all the example works are composed by young, contemporary composers, with a pretty even mix of male and female artists. And many of them are Australian: Amanda Cole, Chris Williams, Melody Eötvös, William Gardiner, Julian Day and yours truly, alongside some international composer pals I've met along the way. Because while it's one thing to show a compositionally-inclined 16-year-old some tricks and techniques to make their music great, it's a totally different thing to show a kid from the country that, even though there's no one around them that 'gets it', there's a lot of young people out there in the big wide world just like them.

Further links

Tim Hansen - AMC profile

Introduction to the composer's craft - information, preview and subscriptions on Soundfly website