Choral composing

When you write music, you're sharing your philosophy, the whole way you see the world. It's a really brave thing to do! The times I've written music and shared it with people have been some of the times I've felt the most vulnerable.

Recently I sat down with Dr. Meredith Brammeier, a composer, singer, and professor at California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo, California. Her music has been performed in California and around the world. We got together to talk about her music, what leads to success as a choral composer, and how she navigates writing and publishing. She also shared all the permissions needed to use a poem!

Meet Meredith.

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What type of choral music do you write?

I write tonal music, so that is music that has a tonal center or a pitch center. You might think of it as pieces that have a key, although sometimes it can be pretty chromatic and move around a lot into different keys or different kind of pitch centers. I tend to write music that has some shifting harmonies.

I like to use a lot of different kinds of rhythms in my pieces. It's pretty rare to have a piece that is in 4/4, four beats per measure all the way through for my music.

I would say composers that influence me have been composers like Benjamin Britten, Ralph Vaughan Williams. Aaron Copland was a big influence, especially from my younger years. I think the rhythmic aspects of Igor Stravinsky have been very influential. Going back a longer time ago, the music of J.S. Bach. His counterpoint and the way he sets text is a big influence as well.

Everything I've performed also is an influence! When you perform a piece, you're really in the middle of it, and you get to hear it through rehearsals, and learn the things that are hard for the choir to learn or figure out, and how certain things come together.

How do you get known as a choral composer?

A lot of the success is from building relationships with conductors, with other musicians, with ensembles.

Hopefully you have a good recording or two of some of your previous pieces, and then you share those. They get to know what your style is like, what your music sounds like. Especially these days, people really want to hear the music as well as look at a score.

If you want to do different kinds of music, find some groups that maybe are more interested in certain types of music.

There are opportunities to like answer a call for scores, I've done that a few times. Or participate in a music festival of some sort where the end result is a performance of a new piece that you've written.

I've joined a few Facebook groups like ACDA, the American Choral Directors Association, and sometimes choir conductors will say, "Hey, I'm looking for pieces that follow this particular theme." They have a concert, and they're doing a particular theme. If you happen to have a piece that is on that theme, then you're like, "Oh yeah me."

How do you navigate publishing?

Publishers will often want you to be established online, because they want to sell a lot of scores too.

I self-publish everything, Now it's so easy, and we have so many tools. I do a lot of it through JW Pepper. They'll have it available on the website, then if people want to order paper scores they'll print it.

Layers of poetry

Texts are tricky because you have to think about copyright. If it's a text that's under copyright, you have to make sure that you can get permission to use it before you even begin writing the piece.

You have to get several permissions:

to set the text to music
to publish it in whatever way it's gonna be published
to distribute it if you want to record it, that's a different permission

It can be really complicated especially if it's a big name poet. There are certain poets that just didn't want their poems set to music, so you just couldn't get permission until after it goes into public domain.

As a contemporary composer, you want to be dealing with contemporary words and contemporary subjects. I've found that knowing a poet useful.

Sometimes I write my own words, but rarely, because you want to make sure that the words are good words, that the poem is well-written. Poets get a lot of education about how to put words together in different ways.

What do you wish people knew about the world of choral composing?

Audiences: I think that the first thing to know is that the composer really wants you to like their music! We're happy to talk to you about the piece afterwards if you have questions about it.

Conductors: I would like them to know that we're excited share our music with them, with their ensembles, and that, again, we like to make that relationship happen.

New composers: experiment a lot with a lot of different kinds of sounds, and listen a lot different kinds of music. Be open kinds of music where maybe you say, "Ugh, I don't like that." But listen to it anyway, because it may give you some ideas that wouldn't come to you otherwise.

What is a recent (or memorable) Zeitgeist Moment?

We did a performance together with Eric Whitacre.

Sometimes, but not always, when you're singing with a group, especially when you're a cappella (no accompaniment), you can really get a chord in tune. That means that all of these overtones are ringing, and I can feel it in my head! You're a part of that big chord, and there's this feeling of everyone totally in sync with each other.

You're creating this chord that the composer wrote, who's right there. It is really a kind of moment that don't think I've experienced in any other setting,

No matter what else is going on out there, when we all get together and we ring on that chord, there's nothing else that you're thinking of at that moment.