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Departing from a discussion on Sarastro's art song "There and back again", I would like to discuss the question of composing with (or without) the aid of the piano. A historical retrospection might shed some light on the topic: Someone like Ravel regarded the piano as an essential aid for music composition. He used it to discover "new sounds". Others, like Weber and Berlioz, have warned composers to make too much use of the piano when composing because it would make the ideas conventional and result in something which is rather an improvisation than a composition. (I have read this somewhere in the book "Music, the Brain and Ecstasy" by Robert Jourdain, but don't ask me where exactly.) I personally use the piano very rarely for compositions. Sometimes I use ideas for compositions from improvisations on the piano, but the process of composing is different from that. What do you think? Does composition benefit or suffer from the use of a piano? This might even lead to the more general question of what your technique of composition is. I'm curious about your contributions. :)

I could not compose without a piano. I would start out improvising and exploring at the piano, and come up with some harmonic gimmick, which is paired with some pianistic gimmick. Normally I would stick to certain chord classes or some general system, to keep a certain coherence, but if either by chance or systematic exploration I stumble upon some harmony outside the main system that I like, I keep it. (That said, my initial piano explorations are not random and aimless, I usually have a more or less vague preconception of the kind of sound I want to get, or some general harmonic systems I want to use, but I'm prepared for whatever unexpected find it might come up). Once the improvisational exploration is done and the sounds and textures, and certain core ideas are internalized, I compose (i.e. organize the material) outside the piano. In this stage my piano writing gets refined; I mean, when improvising, I tend to use some stock gestures and textures, but when processing on paper, I realize things that I can modify, notes that I can add to the texture, motifs that I can switch around and stuff like that. The writing becomes richer and less mediated by mechanical favorite gestures. Then I go back to the piano to test out, then back to paper or notation software until happy. Now, I am a pianist and write almost exclusively for piano and solo instrument (very rarely for piano solo), so the use of piano is essential for me to guarantee playability and idiomatic writing. If writing for an ensemble of melodic instruments (or orchestra) I think I would still use the piano to come up with general ideas, not as detailed as when writing for the piano, because otherwise the music will sound like piano music, only orchestrated, and no like idiomatic music for the instruments involved. To sum up: I agree with Ravel: Piano is an essential tool for me to come up with "new sounds" (at least, new for me), which have built-in textures and idimomatic pianistic effects. I also agree with Berlioz and Weber: It is something I have noticed myself; I tend to use certain favorite harmonies or patterns or pianistic gestures when exploring at the piano, resulting in conventional, and a bit barebones writing (because I'm not much of a virtuoso, so the things I can naturally play are not very technically interesting or demanding). Also, my crude improvisations seldom have a proper structure. My solution is to play as much piano music as I can, to stimulate my pianistic inventiveness, and also to refine and organize the material on paper or screen. Advanced keyboard skills are perhaps not very critical if not writing for the piano nowadays, since as .fseventsd has pointed out, notation software with playback capabilities gives the composer roughly the same kind of feedback as harmonic and melodic exploration at the piano. Computer performance can be very misleading, though, and might not work well in real life (the orquestration issues .fseventsd mentioned). I have also noticed that composers without solid keyboard skills, when writing for the piano relying on software, either write banal and conventional things to be safe, or write outlandish and unnatural music (if playable at all), or something that sounds nice on computer but would not work in a real piano, or do not use the piano to its full potential, or something. There are some exceptions to be seen in this site, though, and the converse is also true (i.e. a good pianist can write insipid or badly structured piano music; piano skills and composing skills do not necessarly overlap).

If you ever press the "play back" button while working on something in a digital scorewriter, you are composing with a piano. The only difference is that the once-essential keyboard skills are now obsolete (and with them comes a noticeable decline in the playability & quality of orchestration in amateur composers' works)