composers should write more
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2ae16e68-6b4b-4897-aa08-cd4375415438_320x141.jpeg)
This sounds like something my Korean mother would have said if she knew I wanted to be a composer. I can hear it now:
“Beethoven (or Mozart or Chopin or Rachmaninoff or Liszt) composed for eight hours a day! You barely write for an hour a day! How do you expect to be a composer if you don’t write?!”
Nope. I’m not going to guilt my fellow composers into writing more music; I’m going to guilt them into writing more words.
I was inspired to write this particular blog post when I read Daniel Felsenfeld’s piece “The Composer’s Other Voice” in the New York Times:
“It is not only that we composers lack a place at the cultural and political conversational table, but that most of those at said table hardly know we’re there. Composers...seem to have less of a public platform than ever before, even for addressing matters musical. This was not always true. Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann, Claude Debussy, Ferruccio Busoni, Richard Wagner, Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Milton …
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