I recently listened to a biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The musical styles and the tools have changed completely since his day. The work itself hasn’t.
Here are six thoughts that stuck with me.
1. Do Your Groundwork
Modern narrative paints Mozart as a wonderchild, a freak of nature. The reality is less mysterious.
He started practicing the clavier at three, under his father’s direction. By five he was composing little pieces. He never stopped. Years of daily work, long before any of the famous output, gave him the structures to build on.
By the time he reached his peak as a composer, Mozart was already extremely proficient with several instruments and every existing compositional style of his day. He learned through imitation. He copied, absorbed, mimicked.
That groundwork is what let him connect dots fast and push the form when the time came. There were no shortcuts. There rarely are.
2. Treat Each Project as a Challenge
Composers in Mozart’s day depended on commissions. In his hardest years he resorted to ghost writing, despite being a proud man.
He couldn’t always go as wild as he wanted. But he always pushed for something interesting within the frame he was given. He found a way to inject his personality into every piece, no matter how routine the brief.
This applies directly to your work. If you’re making your own album, push hard. If it’s a soundtrack for a shampoo ad, that doesn’t mean you hand the client something boring. Find the angle. Put thought in. Make it special.
The people who hire you are taking notes. Each project is a stepping stone. Treat it that way.
3. Be Strange in Your Own Work
All classic music was once new music. Most of it was controversial when it came out.
Mozart got plenty of praise in his lifetime. But his music wasn’t liked by everyone. Not by a long shot. It was often perceived as too complex, too difficult. The sheets of his compositions were sometimes thought to contain transcription errors. Sometimes people assumed the musicians were playing wrong.
He didn’t care. He wasn’t content writing what had already been written. He wanted to push.
Listen to the opening of his String Quartet No. 19 (K.465). It still sounds out of this world. It walks a fine line between “wrong” and beautiful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjZylz3nCwQ
This was published in 1785. Imagine how it sounded then.
New ideas take time to land. If you want to originate, you won’t be liked by everyone. You’ll be ridiculed by some. So to hell with being conventional. Explore and be strange.
4. Get to Your Important Work Early
Mozart was usually up at five. By six he was composing, and he spent all morning on it. He often worked late into the night, but he always made sure to be up early.
Mornings are when the brain is rested. Focus is sharper. Associations come faster. The hours are quiet and undistracted. Your circadian rhythm naturally supports it.
And there is nothing like the feeling of having done your best work before most people have woken up.
5. Create Worlds
Great music shows people places they’ve never been. Moods, atmospheres, somewhere new.
Instrumental music, the most abstract of all the art forms, gives you infinite options to do that.
Mozart used imitation as practice and he was very good at it. In his serious work, he never repeated what others were doing. He could have made a more stable living writing the easy popular pieces of his day. Then he wouldn’t be remembered.
Study other music. Learn from it. Be influenced. But the influence is only groundwork.
When it’s time to create, follow your instinct. Discover and create your own worlds.
6. Don’t Let Hardship Put You Down
Mozart’s life was filled with psychological hardship and physical suffering.
He lost four of his six children. He had a difficult relationship with his father and lost his mother when he was 22. He was physically fragile from early childhood, scarred for life by smallpox, plagued with tonsillitis and chronic kidney failure. He rarely saw a healthy day. His wife Constanze was frequently ill too. The last four years of his life were spent in severe debt. All of this took a toll on his mental state.
Under these conditions he wrote an enormous body of masterful music. He kept composing feverishly until the very end. His final work, Requiem, was left unfinished and completed by his student Franz Xaver Süssmayr. It pulls together everything he had learned. Even on his deathbed he was occupied with finishing it. Listening to it leaves me without words.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPlhKP0nZII
What’s most striking is that despite the suffering and the workload, Mozart lived a full social life. He had a vivid sense of humor and a large circle. He loved performing. He was not a recluse and not a captive of his work.
That might be his greatest lesson.
Best, Ilpo Resound