... concerning the composition of musical scores ...

 

    To me, music composition, in its truest and broadest sense, is not a specialised, separate, isolated endeavor, nor a discipline to be cordoned off within the hierarchy of specialised musical labor. Rather, it is a fundamental mode of being within Music itself — a generative act that arises naturally from the matrix of musical thought and practice. To compose is not merely to write, nor simply to invent: it is to think musically. It is to participate in the ongoing process of making and shaping musical tones (notes in the score) in ways that reflect both individual voice and universal order.

    This understanding of composition challenges the prevailing model that sees it as an autonomous, innovation-driven enterprise, detached from performance and improvisation, and embedded in the narratives of progress, stylistic rupture, or aesthetic rupture. My personal philosophy of music composition — or more precisely, score composition (since performance itself is also a form of composition, albeit in a different medium) — rejects both the fragmentation that severs music from its cultural, sensory, and cognitive origins, and the fetishization of novelty that elevates formal experimentation above expressive or ontological meaning.

    Notation is not tone. It never was. Nor is it a perfect translation of musical thought. Notation is an interface — a porous, contingent, flexible domain where visual symbol and aural presence intersect. It exists not to fix music, but to suggest its contours. In this view, notation is not univocal or rigid, but a gesture — a means of inviting performance, of opening the door to interpretation and transformation. It lives, therefore, at the threshold between the oral and the written, where memory, imagination, and real-time decision making converge.

    The Western tradition has long emphasized the written as the seat of authority in music. But following thinkers like Walter Ong, we must acknowledge that oral and literate musical cultures coexist and interact in ways far more complex than linear narratives of “progress” allow. Composition, then, becomes a dynamic interplay: between the written and the improvised, the premeditated and the emergent, the score and the moment, the symbol and the breath.

In my classroom, this idea is not theoretical — it is lived. That is, with my students, I move between oral improvisation (such as contrapunto alla mente, a cappella discants over drones, or extemporaneous keyboard partimenti) and written counterpoint (Fuxian species, canon, fugue), always weaving a thread between res facta and musica ficta. The written and the improvised are not adversaries, but collaborators. Notation is not a prison, but a poetic trace — something that reanimates in contact with living sound.

Stylistic categories, while historically and culturally meaningful, are, to me, ultimately insufficient containers for the depth of musical expression. That is, I do not approach style as a museum taxonomy or a historically materialist science, but as a surface manifestation of something far deeper: the perennial and cross-cultural foundations of musical meaning. In this light, composition is not primarily the organization of style, but the revelation of what lies beneath style — what Plato  named the five Magista Genae (the give Great Ideas or Genres): the same, the different, stasis (repose), kinesis (motion/change), and being.

    These universals manifest as repetition (the same), imitation, variation, and transformation (the different), cadence and repose (stasis), modulation, transition, and dynamism (kinesis), and the ontological presence of musical tone itself (being). A composer does not invent these — they are always already there. Rather, the task is to listen deeply, to synthesize inherited forms and structures in ways that speak to the eternal drama of musical tones: a drama that transcends historical period or cultural affiliation.

    Against this backdrop, one can speak of the prevailing logic of fragmentation in much contemporary art and art music. It is often claimed today that the artist must not only reflect the brokenness of our time but even accelerate it — that by portraying things even more disintegrated than they are, the artist proves his historical authenticity. But such logic is self-defeating. It is akin to someone who joins a tyrannical regime not to resist it, but to document that they lived through it. Surely, one may also inhabit a time in opposition to it.

    It is said today too that the modern artist - or musician/composer - must reflect the “compartmentalized consciousness” of today — a splintered view of reality in which objects no longer appear as wholes, but in formal chaos. But such art, which revels in dismemberment, does not tell the truth about the world. It merely mirrors confusion. And mere reflection is not the work of art. The task of the composer — of any artist — is not to reproduce entropy, but to reorder, to restore, or at the very least, to mourn the temporary loss of order with dignity. A work that does not offer wholeness must at least offer the grief of its absence. To do otherwise is to triumph in the spectacle of destruction.

    There is something healing in a composition where wholeness has been restored — or even gently evoked in its absence. In a fragmented world, the work of art can either collapse into the general disintegration, or it can serve as the site of return. As in certain styles of ancient Chinese painting, where a single blossom evokes the full invisible tree — so too should a musical phrase contain within it the reverence of the whole it implies. Fragmentation that refers to nothing, that exults in its own autonomy, becomes superficial magic: a kind of sterile simulation, floating above time and space like a false icon, gleaming with a light not of truth but of oblivion.

    It is not enough to say that fragmentation is a beginning, a step toward something yet to come. It has revealed itself too clearly. We must not confuse the uniformity of destruction with the unity of essence. One comes from fullness, the other from scarcity. Art that simply joins the vortex of dissolution loses its sovereignty — becoming not a product of the human but of the machine of fragmentation itself. Press a button, and out comes another composition, another abstraction, another annihilation.

    This is not Orpheus. Orpheus did not conquer the underworld by becoming darker than it. He sang — a song luminous enough to draw Euridice out of the shadows.

    In my opinion, if there is a material repository of musical universals, it is folk music — that vast, interwoven inheritance of sung tradition, often anonymous, often unwritten, always alive. Like Zoltán Kodály, I see folk song not as primitive material to be elevated by “higher” art, but as the purest embodiment of musical truth: modal integrity, organic form, archetypal contour, human cadence.

    Memorizing, singing, and improvising on folk melodies forms one of the basis of my compositional pedagogy. This has nothing to do with “vocal technique,” but rather with a form of poetic solmization — a recovery of sonization, where the arm moves through euphonic space, at the same time as the interval is sung and felt vibrantly in the body. Here, diction takes on the ancient meaning attributed by Aristides Quintilianus: not mere pronunciation, but the shaping of tone with intelligible soul.

    By singing and inventing over drones, by absorbing the tonal DNA of ancestral tunes, students come to understand music not through abstraction, but through lived resonance. Composition becomes a natural extension of these sonic encounters — not an imposed architecture, but an unfolding.

    It was precisely in this spirit that I received my earliest and most enduring compositional - musical - upbringing with Don Salvador Chuliá in Valencia, Spain — a composer, conductor, educator, and my teacher between the ages of 10 and 17. Though my music today bears little stylistic resemblance to his - in superficial appearance - I consider himself my true Music teacher and his humble disciple, and I proudly count myself as a link in the long lineage he inherited and transmitted: from Alessandro Scarlatti (student of Pasquini and Carissimi), Gaetano Greco (student of Salvatore and Ursino), through Francesco Durante, Giovanni Paisiello, Nicola Vaccai, Emilio Arrieta, Felipe Pedrell, Bartolomé Pérez Casas, Modesto Rebollo, Ernesto Pastor Soler, and finally, Salvador Chuliá himself.

    From Don Salvador I learned that composition was not a set of abstract principles, but the living logic of song — el canto, el melos — and that the true criterion for a musical phrase was not its correctness, but whether it sang. “No hay fallos, Josu, pero no canta” he used to tell me, about my counterpoint exercises— “There are no mistakes, but it doesn’t sing” — and those words became the bedrock of my musical thinking. He taught me, without ever naming it as such, that conatus — the scholastic idea of continuous motion and inner inclination — is the essence of both music and life: that everything falls, as in a cadence, but everything must also resume, as in the sea wave that crashes only to rise again. From him, I learned that to compose is to restore movement, not to petrify it; to write the sea, not the rock.

    Chuliá transmitted to his students not merely the bricks and mortar of musical technique, but the meaning of musical art and how it connected to life. As a very spiritual person, he likened the relationship between form and emotion in music to the relationship between reason and faith. One of his sayings, the same as Nadia Boulanger's, describes this beautifully: “One must approach music with serious rigor and, at the same time, with a great, affectionate joy.” He sought to bring together intellect and feeling — emotional expression always guided by rational control, and structure always infused with inner light.

    To end, I’ll add that, in terms of traditions, as a score composer, I most likely align with a certain qualified idea of what today people call polystylism - despite my hesitations about the label (or taxonomies in general). In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, so-called polystylism emerged as a way of reconciling the fractured stylistic landscape of modernity. But polystylism must not be confused with eclecticism — a passive collage of materials — but rather understood as a deliberate, coherent fusion of multiple musical identities. It is not the juxtaposition of styles that matters, but the synthesis of their expressive possibilities into a singular compositional voice. In a certain sense, all great composers were poly stylists, as Wye Jamison Allanbrook taught us in her maasterful book about Mozart, for example. 

    In this regard, polystylism echoes the musical universals I described above. It acknowledges that style is never pure, that no musical utterance is without lineage or influence, and that the task of the composer is not to mask or erase that complexity, but to integrate it. The result is not pastiche, but plural unity: a form of expression that is at once personal and historically aware, resonant and synthetic. But history seen here not as a science, but as circular momentum . 

    As my admired George Rochberg once noted, a new artistic music — should it come into being — would require at least three principles:

1. Parallel/serial functions: coherent melodic continuities that unfold across multiple layers

2. Memory functions: self-perpetuating structures of repetition and variation that generate coherence and recognizability

3. Logical directionality: goal-oriented relationships that mirror the teleological behavior of the central nervous system

    These ideas, far from excluding folk material, improvisation, or oral traditions, suggest that the most future-facing music will also be the most integrative — the music that welcomes memory, intention, motion, identity, and contradiction into its very form, leaving behind the a-semantic abstraction of a lot of academic music of the 20th century, with its solipsistic, an-anthropic fetishisation of sound over tone. 

    But ultimately, for me, composition is not a prescriptive act. It is not the imposition of a system, nor the codification of an ideology. It is an invitation — to performer, to listener, to co-create meaning. It is not the solitary heroism of the creator, but the quiet dialogical process of listening, shaping, and offering. In this light, the composer is not a master of materials, but a participant in a wider ecology of sound — a servant of musical tone, of gesture, of breath.

    So, to me, composing means to mediate between past and present, between idea and presence, between silence and form. It is to reveal, not to dictate. To call forth, not to impose. It is to stand at the meeting place of memory and imagination, and to make something that feels — however briefly — inevitable.

    And if I am able to stand there today — between those spaces, shaping those lines — it is because once, a long time ago, Don Salvador Chuliá showed me how. With his voice, his gesture, his love of music, and his fidelity to the invisible sea behind every musical and emotional wave.