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My favourite quotes are drawn from my one true textbook "Bluff your way in Music". A few examples: Polyrhythmic: Someone who can dance a quickstep to a waltz. Tchaikovsky: He'd have been rich if films had been around in his time. Accidental: A wrong note played on purpose.

No one here understood the joke. “What do you get when you drop a piano on a mineshaft? … A flat minor.” Of course it is not in A flat. Of course it should have been a four hands score. Of course the time signature is incorrect. Many scorers seem to focus on the ink, the font and the paper. What happens when you focus too much on the score and not enough on musical inspiration? You become a scorer that perfectly score uninspired music, not a composer, should he be young or old. If Iannis Xenakis (which I met in Montreal in 1967) had written his music the conventional way, his music wouldn't have exist. We could say the same of many other modern composers. Even Beethoven had a terrible writing. This Young Composer blog focus on scoring, which is good. However, it may be focusing too much on the technicalities of scoring and not enough on the music composing itself. And frankly, would I really put my best score on this blog such that someone can copy my best tricks in his score. Of course not. If a composer relies on the score to listen to music and can't use his ears to figure chords, intervals, melodies, articulations, then he is not a real composer. He is just a scorer even when you are a well trainne scorer but still just a scorer. The ear is like a muscle. You must train it to understand the music well above the score technicalities. Nevertheless, continue the good work scoring but listen more. Cheers