Film composing is a splendid discipline, and I recommend a course of it to all composition teachers whose pupils are apt to be dawdling in their ideas, or whose every bar is sacred and must not be cut or altered.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Vaughan Williams suggests film composition teaches practical editing and flexibility, countering rigid perfectionism in students.
- In plain terms
- Learning film music helps composers who are too slow or protective of their ideas to be more flexible.
- What can you take from it?
- Use film scoring to teach students to cut and alter their work freely.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- How does constraint foster creativity?
- When is perfectionism harmful?
Another view
Not all classical composers need to learn film techniques to overcome dawdling.
More from Ralph Vaughan Williams
The attitude of foreign to English musicians is unsympathetic, self-opinionated and pedantic. They believe that their tradition is the only one (this is specia…
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