How Did I Learn Composition/Orchestration?

A few days ago, on our Discord channel the question came up of how I actually learned to compose and orchestrate and what I see as best strategies to expand one's skills. I found this question to be worth answering in a dedicated post so here we go.

I have a university degree in composition, arrangement and piano as some of you might know but I have stated several times that this education only partially forms my knowledge background. However, what I found to be a key element I learned at uni is strategies to approach and analyze music to distill its essence to make it usable for me. I gathered some broadband knowledge over all sorts of music in these years, including music that I wouldn't necessarily listen to. But as in music everything has to do with everything, having a framework of knowledge where I can sort in new things is particularly helpful. So while I didn't learn the absolute details of writing and orchestrating music in uni, it helped me to lay ground work for further studies or categorize knowledge that I had already.

The majority of my skillset is self taught and I believe that this is the case for every composer. What you learn in lessons/courses is only the tip of the iceberg. The true learning and figuring out happens on your own when you actually apply things in your own writing. So here are the things that I did and still do on my way:

Read Books:

I was quite a nerdy kid (and am nerdy still today) and invested my pocket money into books about orchestration or film music rather than spending it on things that would be age appropriate. So quite early on I absorbed as much as I could about orchestral instruments, film music etc. This was even before I really started to write orchestral music. It was purely out of fascination for this genre. Over the years I read most books about these topics that are on the market forming a really solid knowledge of the instruments and conceptual approaches regarding film music.

Imitate:

Just a few weeks ago, I accidentally stumbled again over my first ever composition that was performed by an orchestra which I wrote at the age of 17. It was fun listening to it again as I heard in every bar where I took the "inspiration" from.  But this was a huge learning experience back then. I tried to take the devices I heard in scores and apply them into something new, sometimes successfully, most of the time not. The biggest revelations were to figure out the discrepancy of what I thought I heard in the scores vs realizing how wrong or right I was when having my imitation performed by an orchestra.

Transcribe:

A little while after that I got a bit more scientific about this and I started to transcribe music by ear. This was also part of my education which I would consider to be the most helpful approach, especially when you have the actual score to compare it to when you're done. Fortunately, quite early on I was hired for projects that needed me to transcribe a lot. I was (and still am) regularly hired to transcribe old film scores where no more score sheets exist so they need to be reconstructet to be performed again. Having done this for many years has really sharpened my ear for these things and I can relatively precisely figure out what's going on in which instrument when hearing a recording.

Practice Genre Clichés:

There also was a time in my life when I wanted to figure out the genre clichés of film music. So I set out to write a little piece in every film genre that I can think of just to figure out what makes for instance a western score sound like western or what is happening in a thriller score. So in a way this was a way to study devices more thoroughly. I listened to scores from that genre and tried to distill the common ground between them. Some genres I figured out quite quickly, others I didn't figure out at all. Particularly genres that were beyond my harmonic understanding at that time were a failure (e.g. Action writing that goes beyond triads)

Score Sheet Study:

This was huge for me. I remember when I first got my hands on actual film score sheets, at first some of the John Williams Signature Scores, later the less official scans that were floating around online. When I got them first, I was far enough in my understanding of instruments and score sheet study that I could easily dive into them and really take valuable information from them. All this sparked a few years of my life where I really gathered every score sheet of every orchestral piece that I liked, also from the classical literature. It was also fueled by my composition prof who had a room with shelves full of score sheets from every period of music and we would go through one in every lesson. Still today I sometimes dig out a score to check how they have done it in a certain context.

Compose:

This is by far the most important and also most obvious one but I spent and spend excessive amounts of time just writing new music. Fortunately at one point I started to get paid for this but of course nothing can replace the trial and error realizations that you have every day when writing music. There is a quote from John Williams which goes something like "I try to write music every day of my life, even if it's just a little" Nothing beats the learning experience of actually writing music. Even more if you have the luck to hear it played by real musicians (or good samples) afterwards to refine your process from there.

In general, I would say these are the basic steps that I took to learn and I would also say that some of them need a specific "pre knowledge" to be helpful. Score sheet study won't help much if you are just starting out as you will not be able to make a lot of sense out of this.

And additionally, I think the way of learning is extremely depending on your personality. I learn quite well on my own, digging myself into score sheets or trying to figure something out. Others need someone explaining things to them to fully realize them so just because something worked for me it doesn't need to work for someone else.

In any case, it is hard work. Intrinsic motivation to figure things out helps alot but even then the sheer amount of things to learn is huge. I'm glad that I was young and super naive when I started out to not realize how deep this rabbit hole really is for quite some time. I don't know if I would have gone through all this if back then I knew that more than 25 years later I would be sitting here, writing this text and ending it with "I think I have figured out quite a bit of this already, but I'm nowhere near done with it".