This chapter explores ways of thinking about ecology through the medium of composition, and how composing relates to the environments around us. It offers a methodological framework for composition that puts listening at the heart of a composer’s engagement with musical material and meaning making. Alongside the author’s examples there are a number of exercises and provocations to help developing one’s own approaches to composition.

This chapter is intended to invite composers at an earlier stage in their career to think about what their unique musical voice is, and how that might be influenced by the art and ideas existing around them. It concludes with some practical advice to help inspire composers to develop an understanding of what is most special about their musical instinct, imagination, and creativity.

This chapter gives a practical overview of writing for a variety of chamber music scenarios, from the traditional (e.g. string quartet) to the unusual (e.g. tuba trio). It describes how to respond to the existing canon of music for ensemble, as well as being creatively inspired by performers in rehearsal situations.

This chapter considers how notation has been used, questioned, and re-made by composers over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It considers the ideologies behind notation as an interface between composer and performer, and offers some playful examples of notational strategies that invite collaboration with the performer by challenging assumed norms of interpretation and performance.

This chapter balances practical advice with aesthetic considerations to give an overview of a composer’s numerous roles in writing music for opera, dance, and theatre. The chapter begins with an overview of collaborative techniques and language, before understanding a bit more about how to shape musical ideas both by yourself and then through workshopping and rehearsal processes.

How do composers discover new sounds with old instruments? This chapter looks at the relationship between composers and instruments, and explores how responding to instrument design and experiementing with performing techniques and physical materials can create radical and exciting new sounds and ideas.

This introduction briefly explores the relationship between compositional choice and stylistic expectation or ideology. With new music now a plethora of styles and approaches, how might we understand work that’s happening currently in the context of historical and social influence?

This chapter explores the voice as a complex, expressive instrument. It begins by outlining voice types, techniques, and styles – ranging from opera to musical theatre and popular music –  before looking at the relationship between language and music, and finally exploring the nature of idiomatic vocal writing and so-called extended techniques. The chapter finishes with a nod to the future of vocal music by briefly thinking about the voice in conjunction with electronics.

This chapter is about how a composer can reach their audience. It thinks about marketing in broad terms, understanding the music industry in terms of networks and communities, as well as addressing topics like making and releasing recordings, best practice on social media, building a website and engaging with the press.

Music historiography has traditionally been based on ‘methodological nationalism’, the assumption that the nation state is the ‘natural’ context of analysis. As a result, migration tends to be treated as an exception to the rule of nationhood with its comforting myths of belonging and tradition. By contrast, this chapter argues that modernist music can be regarded as the music of exile. It focuses on the ‘normality of migration’, encompassing both forced and voluntary migration, and it covers areas such as the role of international composition teachers and the ‘dodecaphonic diaspora’, the way serialism came to be associated with resistance to fascism and migration. In addition to presenting individual case studies, it seeks to quantify the commonality of migration, using the composers performed at the Annual Festivals of the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM), as a statistical basis. What this demonstrates is that, although mobility may not be the norm, neither is it an exception. Furthermore, it is one of the ways in which the transnational network that is integral to musical modernism has come into being.

Although Impressionism and Symbolism are but two of the numerous ‘-isms’ found in Paris in Debussy’s early years, these two movements are invariably associated with him. This chapter defines the symbolist literary style in France and surveys its development through some of its leading figures as well as its diffusion through some of its main institutions (Mallarmé’s salon, cafés, journals, bookstores). The author distinguishes between two phases in Debussy’s creative output: 1882–1902, when French-speaking literary symbolism clearly dominated the composer’s inspiration, and 1902–1917, when he became receptive to a wider range of poetry (especially that of French poets from the 15th to the 17th centuries). Important Debussy landmark pieces inspired by Symbolist writers (mélodies, the orchestral piece Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, and the opera Pelléas et Mélisande) are situated within the context of other musical works equally inspired by the same writers (Fauré, Bonheur, Bréville, Chabrier, Charpentier, Chausson, Duparc, Ravel).

Debussy’s creative world was deeply enmeshed in the cultural field of the French capital. Steeped in a post-Enlightenment worldview centred on exploration, accumulation of knowledge, and scientific discovery, no aspect of human experience and its habitats was deemed out of bounds in this path to creative accretion. Like many of his contemporaries, Debussy became fascinated by a wealth of new ideas about the world and the human condition that exploded onto the scene during his lifetime. Mysticism and occultism expanded the horizon within which to understand the mind and its creative potential; archaeological discoveries from Greece and Rome brought alive a past that belied the bland classicism so revered only decades earlier; and a rich smorgasbord of historical research – one that encompassed music and its practice – provided new materials from the foreign worlds of medieval, if not mythical, pasts. Over the course of Debussy’s life, these currents were woven together into the conceptual framework that sustained his creative world and that he claimed continually to renew rather than reproduce.