Walter Meyer asks:

>As a non-composer and a non-musician, I'd like to ask whether any well
>known composer (let's leave "greatness" out of this!) can be said to have
>been a better composer for having studied at a conservatory or similar
>institution?

I think a better question to ask is whether they would have become
competent classical-music composers without some sort of training.  As
I say, I know of only one outstanding example, Ernst Toch, who taught
himself.  I do know of many incompetents who taught themselves.  By
"incompetent," I mean people who could not put together anything other than
an awkward mess, who had no idea at all of writing in parts, orchestration,
or form.

>...  It's my impression that musical theory in all its ramifications is
>learned in childhood by the receptive.  Either inspiration to apply that
>knowledge to the composition of great music is there or it isn't.  What
>more does the aspiring composer need to learn during early adulthood in
>an institutional setting?

Mozart wrote his first piece at the age of, I think, five.  I've heard it.
It's brief, wonderful, and far more interesting in fact than when he first
began to study.  He had an ear.  He could play it at the piano, and his
father wrote it down.  However, he probably would not have become the
Mozart we know without study.

A composer's education fits very closely into Mortimer Adler's educational
scheme.  There are three types of learning going on.  First comes basic
data: the meaning of the symbols, the basic recognition of common forms,
the way instruments produce sounds and how their mechanical structure
influences writing for them, how a complex piece of music (or even a simple
one) is put together.  Second comes the acquiring of skills, like the
training of an athlete: learning how to write effectively in parts,
actually putting together long pieces, writing for instruments, writing
effective harmonies (if you write harmonic music).  Third comes what
Adler calls "value" and what I'd call "criticism" - the art of revision,
essentially.  Has the piece realized your goals? If not, why not? How do
you fix it? Much of this doesn't occur sequentially, but simultaneously.
For most composers, this kind of education is a lifelong process, and most
of it won't take place under tutelage.  But it often starts under tutelage.

Aaron Copland is a good case in point.  By the time he went to Paris, he
had gone through the basics of harmony and counterpoint.  Indeed, I believe
he was even a published composer.  When friends of his told him he *had* to
study with Nadia Boulanger, he initially resisted the idea.  She nominally
taught harmony, and he had already studied a complete course.  They finally
persuaded him to sit in one class, and it changed his life.  In particular,
Copland credited Boulanger with teaching him how to write a long piece, as
well as with giving him the confidence to write one.  To me, Copland knew
his stuff, but the only things he began with were his talent and his
desire.  He needed basic skills, and he didn't learn them on his own.

Vaughan Williams is another.  He studied with a faculty of composers:
Ravel, Bruch, Parry, Stanford, and Morris among them.  As a boy, he took
a correspondence course in harmony and counterpoint and went through the
Macfarren curriculum.  Even as an old man, he remained very proud that he
had "done his stodge." But he didn't do it entirely alone.  Up to 1934,
he regularly submitted his scores to criticism by a circle of composers,
most famously Holst, but also including Bax, Walton, Ireland, and others.
Sometimes technical defects were pointed out.  Mostly, however, it was this
third kind of learning that went on.  Vaughan Williams's works sound so
"inevitable" (to borrow Leonard Bernstein's term for Beethoven's music)
that the struggles of composition don't show.  A big revelation for me
was to hear the original recording (EMI CDH 7 63308 2, mono) of the sixth
symphony scherzo, which VW quickly revised.  The original version is pretty
bland.  The final version stings like nobody's business.  Having heard very
early Vaughan Williams, I doubt that he would have achieved much without
tuition.

Steve Schwartz