The Craft of Music Composition and Why Training Is Fundamental

In the early 2000s I was genuinely puzzled by a question I could not find answered anywhere: what does the path to becoming a composer actually look like? I found the answer in a letter by Canadian composer and theorist Alan Belkin, addressed to aspiring composers. If you are serious about this path, I encourage you to read it in full. It changed how I understood my own training.

One line in that letter has stayed with me ever since. Belkin writes that composing is first and foremost a craft, and that you have to become an artisan before you can be an artist.

That is the whole post, really. Everything else is what that principle looks like in practice.

This post is part of the Piano Tree path series. For context on how the earlier years of training lead here, see The Ideal Piano Training Part 4: The Professional Years.

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I am writing this post in English, which is my second language. I can do it relatively freely because I studied English. I will use tools to assist with grammar, but these words are coming from me. They are not being assembled from a phrase book.

Music works exactly the same way. If you train the musical language thoroughly, you will have no problem expressing yourself in it. You can start composing today without any training, and many people do. But I can tell you with certainty, having composed music for more than thirty films, documentaries, advertisements, and short films: the training makes everything twenty times easier. Not because rules make you creative. Because the language becomes yours.

Music is a Language: Train It Before You Try to Speak

The most common frustration I see in young composers is not lack of talent. It is lack of language.

They have musical ideas. They can hear something internally that they want to express. But when they sit down to write, the gap between what they hear and what they can actually notate, harmonise, and orchestrate is so wide that the music that comes out barely resembles what was in their head.

Imagine I taught you to speak Spanish fluently, and then asked you to write me a simple story in it. Once upon a time. You would have no problem. Why? Because you studied the language. Music is no different.

The training does not constrain you. It frees you. Once you have spent years making the harmonic language your own, walking bass lines and voice leading become as natural as choosing words in a sentence. You stop thinking about the mechanics and start thinking about what you want to say.

Today I can receive a film and have a sketch completed by the end of the week. That speed comes directly from the training I did. Not from talent, not from shortcuts, from having put in the hours.

A Composer Must Be a Fluent Reader

Before anything else, the question of reading ability.

A composer who cannot read music fluently is in a genuinely difficult position. Even with MIDI and digital audio workstations, even with all the technology available today, a composer still imagines the score in their head. We hear notation internally before we write it down or programme it. That internal hearing is built from years of reading music, the same way your ability to imagine a sentence in English is built from years of reading English.

How can you write music if you cannot read it fluently? You can imagine what you have seen. You cannot clearly imagine what you have never encountered.

A composer should be a confident reader at least to ABRSM Grade 8 standard. Not a performer at that level necessarily, but someone who can sit with a score and hear it internally with accuracy. The sight reading training that Piano Tree provides is directly relevant here: daily exposure to a wide variety of music builds exactly the internal library a composer draws on when working.

The Training Sequence

Alan Belkin's letter outlines the core disciplines and the order in which they should be studied. His sequence, drawn from long experience, is the one I followed myself, and the one I recommend:

• Stage 1 (1.5 years minimum): Tonal harmony: part-writing, bass lines, chord progressions, all at the keyboard
• Stage 2 (2.5 years minimum): Counterpoint: species counterpoint, imitation, canon, invertible counterpoint, fugue
• Stage 3 (2 years minimum): Orchestration: instrument knowledge, blending, combining planes of tone
• Concurrent: Composition: begin writing early, revise and refine as craft develops

These timelines are minimums for reaching a professional standard, not for completing a course and moving on. Belkin is honest that most students he encounters, including those who have studied at university, cannot accomplish the basic harmony tasks satisfactorily. Understanding has to be accompanied by the ability to do.

Tonal Harmony: At the Piano, Not Just on Paper

This is where most formal training falls short.

Harmony studied only in writing is like trying to learn piano by reading about it. You may pass the theory exam. You will not be able to harmonise freely at the keyboard. And free harmonisation at the keyboard is exactly what a composer needs.

I followed Belkin's advice on this seriously. When I studied harmony, I completed the full Paul Hindemith harmony book with multiple possible solutions to each exercise, supervised by my teacher at the time, Alberto Quercia Lagos, a film and theatre composer from Argentina. The written work was always accompanied by playing and singing. Every progression had to be heard, not just written.

From there I moved into figured bass, which for me was the turning point. Figured bass is not an academic exercise. It is the historical compositional language of the Baroque era, the system through which composers thought and improvised harmony in real time. Studying it gave me the ability to harmonise freely at the piano in a way that years of written harmony alone had not.

Figured bass gave me all the tools I needed to harmonise freely at the piano. It is one thing to analyse harmony on paper. It is another to produce it spontaneously at the keyboard.

I then had the privilege of studying partimento with Peter van Tour, one of the leading scholars of this tradition. Partimento is the historical practice of realising bass lines at the keyboard, closely related to figured bass, and it develops improvisational harmonic thinking in a way that no other method does. It is also increasingly recognised as one of the most effective ways to teach composition and harmony.

Counterpoint and Fugue

Counterpoint is where harmonic knowledge becomes musical thinking.

Species counterpoint, beginning with two-part writing and building toward four-part, teaches you to hear each voice as an independent melodic line while simultaneously hearing the harmonic relationship between them. The most common problem in counterpoint students, as Belkin notes, is superficial harmony. The two disciplines reinforce each other deeply.

I was fortunate to study fugue and counterpoint with Nicola Canzano, whose rigorous and clear approach demanded that every contrapuntal decision be musically justified, not just technically correct. Fugue in particular develops the ability to sustain complex musical argument across long spans of time, something that transfers directly to film and concert music writing.

I also had the opportunity to study with Matteo Messori and with Federico Ciancio, a professor at the Conservatorio Manuel de Falla in Buenos Aires, and the time spent in Argentina studying with Ciancio was among the most formative of my development as a composer.

Orchestration

Orchestration is the discipline that converts compositional ideas into actual sound.

What is easy on the piano is not always idiomatic for an orchestra. What sounds thin at the keyboard can bloom with the right instrumental combination. What works in four-part vocal writing must often be rethought entirely when distributed across a string section with woodwind doublings.

My orchestration studies were done with Norman Ludwin, whose practical, sound-first approach was invaluable. The key lesson I took from that training is that orchestration must always be tested against what can actually be heard. Idiomatic writing for each instrument, what is comfortable, what is risky, what is genuinely impossible, is the hardest knowledge to acquire and the most important.

The connection to piano is direct: what you distribute between your two hands at the piano is essentially a miniature orchestration exercise. The decisions you make about register, balance, texture, and voice leading at the keyboard are the same decisions you make when writing for an ensemble. A pianist who has developed these instincts has a significant head start in orchestration.

What You Discover About Yourself During Training

One of the genuine gifts of thorough training is self-knowledge.

As you work through hundreds of small compositional exercises, you begin to notice things. Certain chords feel right to you in ways others do not. Certain left hand accompaniment patterns suit your hand naturally. Certain textures draw you in while others leave you cold.

For example: I discovered during my training that I am deeply attracted to the ninth on a minor chord. The first time I played that interval in a harmonic exercise, something responded in me. I know this about myself now, and it is part of my voice as a composer. I could not have discovered it any other way. You learn your aesthetic preferences by encountering the full landscape of musical possibility and noticing what moves you.

During training you get to know yourself. You notice immediately some flavours you like, some chords that sound amazing to you, some that sound wrong. This is how you find your own voice, not by deliberately seeking originality, but by writing honestly and discovering what is most your own.

Belkin makes this point beautifully in his letter: your voice will not emerge from cultivating strangeness or abstract originality. It will emerge from the combination of the music you love and the craft you have acquired. Originality is not something you manufacture. It is something you distil.

Finding the Right Teacher

Belkin's advice on teachers is frank and worth reading directly in his letter. A few points I would add from my own experience:

The most important thing is not the teacher's fame or the institution's reputation. It is whether they give you clear, specific, and constructive feedback on your actual work. A lesson should be spent on specific technical questions: is this bass line making harmonic sense, does this passage need another instrument, is this voice crossing unnecessary. If the discussion is mostly about aesthetics and style, the teacher is probably avoiding the areas where they have least to offer.

Watch out for ideological teaching. A teacher who wants you to write in a particular style, or who dismisses music you love as unfashionable, is likely to damage rather than develop your voice. You should listen widely and give everything a genuine chance. But if after several hearings a piece still does not speak to you, you are not obligated to pretend otherwise.

The right teacher at the right moment is one of the most valuable things that can happen to a developing composer. When you find one, commit fully.

The Career Reality

I want to be honest about this, as Belkin is in his letter.

Composing concert music is not a path to financial comfort. Film and media composition can pay reasonably well if you reach a professional level, but that level requires exactly the training described here. The composers who can deliver a sketch by the end of the week when a director sends them footage are the ones who get hired again. Speed comes from fluency. Fluency comes from training.

I am genuinely amazed at the number of young composers who want to compose without doing the training. It makes everything harder. Not just technically harder, but personally harder, because the gap between what you hear internally and what you can produce remains wide and frustrating. Close that gap through training, and composition becomes one of the most satisfying things a musician can do.

One practical piece of advice that Belkin gives and I strongly agree with: write for the performers around you. The first performer interested in your music should be yourself. If you are a pianist, write piano music. Write for the musicians you rehearse and perform with. Getting your music played is far easier when the performers already know and trust you.

How Piano Tree Fits Into the Composer Path

Several elements of the composer training path connect directly to what Piano Tree is designed to build.

The sight reading fluency that a composer needs to imagine and notate music accurately is built through exactly the kind of daily, varied, structured practice Piano Tree provides. The figured bass and counterpoint exercises available in the app develop harmonic and contrapuntal thinking at the keyboard rather than just on paper. The voicing practice develops the same instincts that transfer to orchestration decisions.

The path to becoming a composer is long. Belkin gives conservative minimums: 1.5 years for harmony, 2.5 years for counterpoint, 2 years for orchestration. These overlap, and composition happens throughout. But the time is not a burden. It is the work itself. And the work is genuinely interesting every step of the way.

Start where you are. Build the language. Then speak.

Build the musical literacy every composer needs with Piano Tree

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This post is part of the Piano Tree path series. Explore the other professional directions: The Classical Diploma Path, The Jazz Piano Path, The Church Pianist Path, and The Piano Teacher Path.