The Two-Way Street: On being a Composer-Performer

Whenever I tell someone I’m a musician, their first response is almost always to ask what I play. “Oh,” I reply, “I’m actually a composer.” And then, almost as an afterthought, “But I also play bassoon.” The impression is that I’m a composer first, a bassoonist a far distant second. Nothing could be further from the truth. I may be more interested in having a career primarily built around composing, but I’m also quite dedicated to keeping up my performing abilities. Indeed, these aren’t two separate pursuits for me; instead, they feel deeply connected, and feed back into each other in ways that are mutually reinforcing. In this column, I want to give some examples of what I mean.
1. Performing exposes me to new music.
As a general rule, there are never enough bassoonists. This means I get asked to play in a pretty wide variety of ensembles, and this often means I wind up playing totally unfamiliar music. I first encountered Sondheim when I played in the pit for a production of Merrily We Roll Along. The same thing happened with Britten and The Turn of the Screw. The concert band I play in constantly programs works I don’t know by composers I’ve never heard of. (I actually got into composing in the first place because my high school wind ensemble played a fair bit of good music by living composers — before then I hadn’t known that being a composer was still a thing you could do in the twenty-first century.) Naturally, I don’t love absolutely all of this music, but even a lot of the stuff I don’t makes me go “Oh wow! I had no idea music could sound like that!” And that’s a very important experience for a composer indeed.
2. Listening as a composer builds my ensemble skills.
Much as I’d love to, I can’t afford to buy scores to study all the music that playing exposes me to. (Indeed, sometimes the scores aren’t even readily available for sale.) So often I have to do the best I can with my ears, which means listening intently at every moment in rehearsal. How does the composer get from A to B? What are the fundamental musical materials in this piece, and how are they deployed and transformed? These are the kinds of questions I’m trying to answer when I’m listening as a composer. But this is also the kind of listening that’s very useful as a player in an ensemble. When am I the primary voice, and when am I more accompanimental? What articulations are stylistically appropriate for this piece? Which other instruments have the line I’m playing? Where is the high point of this phrase? Of this movement? Trying to understand the piece as a composer gives me the information that I need to perform it compellingly as a bassoonist.
3. I know how performers approach notation.
Since I do it on a pretty regular basis, I have a good sense of what goes through a performer’s head when they get a new piece of sheet music for a piece they’ve never seen before. Not only has this made me very sensitive to some of the more common notational pitfalls (page turns!), but it means that I’ve seen — and had to play through — multiple different approaches to some of the thornier notational issues that can arise in contemporary music. I know which solutions I find more intuitive as a player, and I’ve seen which ones can cause train wrecks in ensembles. So when I’m trying to figure out the clearest, most user-friendly way to notate a new musical idea I’ve had, I have practical experience, not just textbooks and intuition, to guide me. (And I also have many performing friends who I can turn to for second opinions or instrument-specific questions.)
4. I know how composers approach notation.
The flip side of this, obviously, is that, when faced with a new piece of music, I have some idea of what was running through the composer’s head when they were writing it down. I’ve read through textbooks on notation, and have been able to ask questions about alternate notational systems when composers present in seminar. Strictly on the level of notation, there’s not a lot that can throw me for a loop as a player, and at times I can also explain unusual or unclear things to my section mates beforehand instead of wasting precious rehearsal time on sorting out the issue.
5. Each fills in the other’s holes.
Composing can get really lonely. Sitting by yourself in a room with a piano for long stretches at a time fitfully plunking at things and occasionally writing a few of the resulting sounds down isn’t the most socially-fulfilling activity. (Shocker!) Playing music makes me feel connected to the community of musicians again; there really isn’t anything quite like making meaningful, emotional art with a bunch of friends. It’s a singularly powerful experience, one that composing doesn’t give me, and one that I wouldn’t voluntarily give up for the world. But performing ultimately isn’t enough to satisfy my creative drive; I need to make something that’s really mine, and that means composing. Performing also serves to influence the content of the music I write; in many ways, I’m writing the music that I want to play. I’m not finding it out there in the world, so I have to make it up myself.
Now, I’m not making the argument that being active as both a performer and a composer is the only way to build these skills. Certainly, there are phenomenally brilliant, successful composers who are no great shakes as performers, and likewise profoundly talented, moving performers who haven’t written a note since college theory homework. There are many ways to build the musician’s toolkit, and different ones will work better for different people. The above is merely the path that I’m currently charting towards that distant mountain. I perform. I compose. For me, they both feel like an expression of the same underlying musicality, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.