Composition personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

I started writing music because our school ensemble kept running out of repertoire it could actually play. We had four clarinets, a cello, two trumpets and a drummer who could only manage a steady beat, and nothing in the cupboard fitted. My music teacher suggested I try arranging something, so I downloaded free notation software and spent a half-term making a version of a folk tune that worked for exactly those people. Hearing it come back at me in rehearsal, slightly out of tune and a bar late in places, was more interesting than I expected. The parts I had been proud of on the screen sounded fussy, and a plain held chord I had almost deleted turned out to be the best thing in it. That gap between what I imagine and what an ensemble in a room produces is what I want to spend three years narrowing. Since then I have written short pieces rather than long ones, because I would rather finish something and hear it than keep a grand unplayable project in a folder. I want to study composition formally because I have reached the edge of what I can work out alone. I can hear that my harmonic language repeats itself and that my endings tend to arrive too tidily, but I do not yet have the technique or the range of models to fix it. I want structured teaching in counterpoint and orchestration, deadlines that force me to write for players I do not know, and people who will tell me plainly when a piece is not working yet.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

A-level Music has given me the analytical vocabulary I use daily. Studying Bach chorales taught me to think about inner parts as lines with their own logic rather than as filler under a melody, and my set works in twentieth-century music introduced me to writing where rhythm and timbre carry the argument instead of functional harmony. I now begin most pieces by deciding what the texture will do before I choose any notes. Harmony and counterpoint exercises are slow work for me, but they have made my own writing more deliberate; I can spot where I have doubled a third badly or let two voices move in parallel out of laziness.

A-level Mathematics has been more useful than I anticipated. Working with sequences and with transformations trained me to notice when a pattern is genuinely developing and when it is only being repeated, which is exactly the question I ask about my own bars. English Literature has shaped how I think about form and pacing. Analysing how a poem withholds its resolution, or how a novelist controls the reader's sense of time, gave me practical ideas about when to delay an arrival in a piece of music.

Outside the syllabus I have worked through free online material on orchestration and borrowed scores from the county library, reading Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments alongside a recording to see how the blocks of material are separated. I also keep a notebook of short ideas, dated, so I can see which ones survive a week.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

Most of my practical experience comes from writing for people I actually rehearse with. Over the last eighteen months I have completed nine short pieces, including a two-minute fanfare for our sixth form's awards evening, a setting of a Christina Rossetti poem for three voices and piano that our small choir performed at a carol service, and a set of variations for the community brass band I play tenor horn in. The band gave me the most honest feedback I have had: the second cornets told me my writing sat too high for too long, and rewriting those parts taught me more about practical range than any book had. I copy and edit all my own parts, which has made me careful about page turns, rehearsal marks and legible dynamics.

Playing in the band every Tuesday has also taught me how ensembles actually learn music, and that a rehearsal is a limited resource. I helped section-lead the juniors for a term, breaking passages down slowly, which sharpened my sense of what is difficult and why.

I work Saturdays in a bakery, on the till and packing orders. It is not musical, but the early starts have given me a routine, and I now write for an hour before school most mornings because that is the only time no one needs anything from me. Discipline in producing work, rather than waiting for a good idea, is the habit I am most glad to have built. I also mend and share second-hand mutes and music stands for the band's junior section, which involves more gaffer tape than glamour.

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