Questions to John Rutter: How do I get established as a composer?

This blog post is part a series, in which John answers the questions he is most frequently asked.

How do I get established as a composer?

It helps if you start young. If you are in your teens, enrol in a university or music college with a good track record in producing composers. Maybe form a performing group with your fellow-students, record your performances, and if they are good ones put them on your website. A website is your shop window, try to make it an attractive one. Cultivate performers and conductors: if they like your music they will be its ambassadors. Go in for competitions, they will spread awareness of your work even if you don’t win. If you are interested in media music, get to know some fledgling film and TV directors, they generally turn first to composers they know personally when looking for music. Whatever your area of composition, keep writing, keep trying – you may have to knock on many doors before one will open. Study some successful composers in your area of interest and see if you can learn anything from their case histories, their paths to success have probably been different but one of them might be relevant to you.

Unless pop or certain areas of media music are your speciality, you can’t expect composition to provide your sole source of income in your early years. A composer’s income derives from a combination of commission fees paid at the time the music is written and royalties accruing from its use later. Until you have built up a backlist of work, the royalties will be meagre and the commission fees soon spent. Until I was almost 30 I had to supplement my income in various ways: teaching, working as a copyist and proofreader, playing the organ (badly) for weddings and funerals, a bit of guest-lecturing to music clubs and the like . . . I don’t regret any of it but was glad when I didn’t have to do it any longer.

If you have discovered a vocation for composing later in life, you have to be realistic. There are only a few professions you can enter in mid-life with no previous history, and composition isn’t generally one of them. That’s bitterly unfair, but if you find you have to pursue composing as a cherished hobby rather than a profession, that can be deeply rewarding even if it doesn’t pay the bills.

John

Coming up next in the series: Can you look over my compositions and give me an opinion, and advice on how to get them published?