Composer
A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music.
Etymology and Definition
The term is descended from Latin, compōnō; literally "one who puts together". The earliest use of the term in a musical context given by the Oxford English Dictionary is from Thomas Morley's 1597 A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music, where he says "Some wil [sic] be good descanters [...] and yet wil be but bad composers".
'Composer' is a loose term that generally refers to any person who writes music. More specifically, it is often used to denote people who are composers by occupation or those who in the tradition of Western classical music. Writers of exclusively or primarily songs may be called composers, but since the 20th century, the terms 'songwriter' or 'singer-songwriter' are more often used, particularly in the tradition of popular music. In other contexts, the term 'composer' can refer to a literary writer or, more rarely and generally, someone who combines pieces into a whole.
Across cultures and traditions, composers may write and transmit music in various ways. In much popular music, the composer writes a composition, and it is then transmitted via oral tradition. Conversely, in some Western classical traditions, music may be composed aurally—i.e., "in the mind of the musician—and subsequently written and passed through written documents.
Role in the Western world
Relationship with performers
In the development of European classical music, the function of composing music initially did not have much greater importance than that of performing it.[citation needed] The preservation of individual compositions did not receive enormous attention, and musicians generally had no qualms about modifying compositions for performance.
In the Western world, before the Romantic period of the 19th century, composition almost always went side by side with a combination of singing, instructing and theorizing.
Even in a conventional Western piece of instrumental music, in which all of the melodies, chords, and basslines are written out in musical notation, the performer has a degree of latitude to add artistic interpretation to work by such means as by varying his or her articulation and phrasing, choosing how long to make fermatas (held notes) or pauses, and — in the case of bowed string instruments, woodwinds or brass instruments — deciding whether to use expressive effects such as vibrato or portamento. For a singer or instrumental performer, deciding how to perform music that has been previously composed and notated is termed "interpretation." Different performers' interpretations of the same work of music can vary widely in terms of the tempos that are chosen and the playing or singing style or phrasing of the melodies. Composers and songwriters who present their music are interpreted just as much as those who perform the music of others. The standard body of choices and techniques present at a given time and a given place is referred to as performance practice. In contrast, interpretation is generally used to mean the individual choices of a performer.
Although a musical composition often has a single author, this is not always the case. A work of music can have multiple composers, which often occurs in popular music when a band collaborates to write a song, or in musical theatre, where one person may write the songs, the orchestration of the accompaniment parts, and writing of the overture is done by an orchestrator. The words may be written in the third person.
A piece of music can also be composed with words, images, or, in the 20th and 21st centuries, computer programs that explain or notate how the singer or musician should create musical sounds. Examples of this range from wind chimes jingling in a breeze to avant-garde music from the 20th century that uses graphic notation, to text compositions such as Aus den Sieben Tagen, to computer programs that select sounds for musical pieces. Music that makes heavy use of randomness and chance is called aleatoric music and is associated with contemporary composers active in the 20th century, such as John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Witold Lutosławski.
The nature and means of individual variation of the music are varied, depending on the musical culture in the country and time period it was written. For instance, music composed in the Baroque era, particularly in slow tempos, often was written in bare outline, with the expectation that the performer would add improvised ornaments to the melody line during a performance. Such freedom generally diminished in later eras, correlating with the increased use by composers of more detailed scoring in the form of dynamics, articulation et cetera; composers became uniformly more explicit in how they wished their music to be interpreted, although how strictly and minutely these are dictated varies from one composer to another. Because of this trend of composers becoming increasingly specific and detailed in their instructions to the performer, a culture eventually developed whereby faithfulness to the composer's written intention came to be highly valued (see, for example, Urtext edition). This musical culture is almost certainly related to the high esteem (bordering on veneration) in which performers often hold the leading classical composers.
The historically informed performance movement has revived the possibility of the performer elaborating the music seriously as given in the score, particularly for Baroque music and music from the early Classical period. The movement might be considered a way of creating greater faithfulness to the original in works composed at a time that expected performers to improvise. In genres other than classical music, the performer generally has more freedom; thus, for instance, when a performer of Western popular music creates a "cover" of an earlier song, there is little expectation of an exact rendition of the original; nor is exact faithfulness necessarily highly valued (with the possible exception of "note-for-note" transcriptions of famous guitar solos).
In Western art music, the composer typically orchestrates his or her compositions, but in musical theatre and pop music, songwriters may hire an arranger to do the orchestration. In some cases, a pop songwriter may not use notation at all and instead, compose the song in his or her mind and then play or record it from memory. In jazz and popular music, notable recordings by influential performers are given the weight that written scores play in classical music. The study of composition has traditionally been dominated by the examination of methods and practice of Western classical music. Still, the definition of composition is broad enough for the creation of popular and traditional music songs and instrumental pieces and to include spontaneously improvised works like those of free jazz performers and African percussionists such as Ewe drummers.
History of employment
During the Middle Ages, most composers worked for the Catholic church and composed music for religious services, such as plainchant melodies. During the Renaissance music era, composers typically worked for aristocratic employers. While aristocrats typically required composers to produce a significant amount of religious music, such as Masses, composers also penned many non-religious songs on the topic of courtly love: the respectful, reverential love of a great woman from afar. Courtly love songs were prevalent during the Renaissance era. During the Baroque music era, many composers were employed by aristocrats or as church employees. During the Classical period, composers began to organize more public concerts for profit, which helped composers to be less dependent on aristocratic or church jobs. This trend continued in the Romantic music era in the 19th century. In the 20th century, composers began to seek employment as professors in universities and conservatories. In the 20th century, composers also earned money from selling their works, such as sheet music publications of their songs or pieces or sound recordings of their works.
- Wikipedia article: Composer
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