We recently connected with Ian Wiese and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Ian, thanks for joining us today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

I spent a lot of time (and money) in the academic space. Currently, I have received my Bachelors, Masters, and Doctorate of Musical Arts all in Composition. In this space, as much as you rely on your professors and what they’re teaching you, you are also required to become an autodidact. There are theory texts and concepts that professors won’t teach you because there isn’t enough time, and that time is better used to spread the wealth to everyone as best as possible. Find books that are written by composers and theorists discussing their concepts or thought processes. Ask people around you to see their scores and follow along with recordings. If you find a passage in a piece of music that you enjoy, copy that out for your own purposes by hand with pencil. Make every effort to do the work for yourself and not always rely on others to bring it to you for your consumption. I wish I had known that sooner, as that would have meant I spent more time refining the craft rather than learning it.

Ian, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m a contemporary classical music composer. Mostly, I spend my time composing new works on commission or on spec if I happen to know someone well enough and that will lead me to many performances in sequence. I’m also responsible for publishing these works or sending them out to other publishing houses to see if they will take on my works and promote them to their larger bases. For those familiar with the field, you will know it’s also, in this day and age, impossible to make a living from being a composer alone. I’m also currently an Associate Professor of Ear Training at Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA (where I also teach adjunct in Composition as the need requires). On Saturdays, I teach at New England Conservatory Preparatory School mainly in the Theory Department, teaching Music Theory and Aural Skills to kids ages seven through pre-college. Recently, I was also made the Artistic Director for the oldest musical society in the United States as recognized by the Guiness Book of World Records, the Old Stoughton Musical Society, programming concerts and conducting them. Aside from a few other hats I wear on occasion, this represents the bulk of what I do as a musician currently.

I got into the field as many do, performing. I started on euphonium in grade school, switching to the bigger cousin tuba in high school. That’s also when I found I was less satisfied performing and more satisfied composing and arranging. Starting with arranging, of all things, the theme song for Fraggle Rock for a cappella jazz choir, I got into composing progressively between opportunities given to my by my high school ensembles and summer programs like the Penn State Summer Band Camp. By being given the chances I had been given, I was allowed to start in a relatively controlled circumstance. My choir and band directors kept watch of what I was doing and offered their guiding hand as best they could, also sending me to many private lessons with instrumentalists and composers as possible. It was a way to both start early and start late at the same time.

My actual composing can be best described as postmodern. I believe that every piece has a desire to be what it wants to be independent of forcing style or syntax. If a piece wants to be neotonal, then I will let it be neotonal. If it wants to be serial, I will let it be serial. If it wants to be microtonal…you get the idea. Usually this results in a hodge-podge of works that share a few key aspects of DNA that’s inherent to my own compositional voice. Right now, though, I’ve been delving more into the strings realm, having had to compose a few works back to back for string quartet and orchestra where I began focusing less on the winds, brass, and percussion and instead more on the string body.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

The biggest thing I had to unlearn is that old tools are not useless. In today’s day and age, there’s this deeply held belief that everything we do as artists must be cutting edge or unconstrained by past generations’ practices. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. When I was first starting out, I made the asinine statement that “Form is dead; the only way forward is through-composing,” meaning that the music had no sense of repetition or structure and instead was composed like a stream of consciousness. As listeners and musicians, we love the idea of repetition when it’s controlled and not completely literal. It provides a sense of return and familiarity, and for the composer it provides a sense of completion and also allows us to better utilize materials. Sonata form, rondo form, ternary form…these ideas exist because they work. Does every piece have to follow each convention to the letter? Absolutely not, but they should be aware of the principles behind them. For example, my most recent violin sonata with piano has a first movement that could be described best as “following the sonata form principle.” It doesn’t really fit the mold of the traditional sonata, but it still takes two or three ideas, mashes them together in development, and returns to them later having been impacted by the journey we took…just in a less structured manner. In fact, many of my current works, to their benefit, utilize these older concepts. Tell that to my younger, more naive self and he would have balked. Be willing to unlearn this idea that art must not be tied to the past, for knowing where we came from will leave you better off.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

What’s most rewarding is really getting to hear my music performed and enjoyed by an audience. I know that sounds rather simple, but when you compose, or in many ways create anything, you’re taking something abstract that you had to mold and present it to the people at large. That’s actually a terrifying idea, if you think about it, as you’re putting something you made from nothing out there for others to absorb, criticize, and hopefully like. So when I see a piece going over well with the audience, be it performers, the general listening crowd, or other composers (remember Milton Babbitt’s real title of “Who Cares If You Listen?,” “The Composer as Specialist…”), that’s the best feeling you could imagine. Every piece has a different audience, yes, but as long as that connection is made, and it knows that it’s for THAT audience, then it’s a success.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.ianwiese.com/

Image Credits

Headshot by Nile Scott Hawver

Incidentals by Lindsay Goodman, Mitchel Lutch, Seungoh Ryu