Outside the Academy? Classical composers with no ‘formal’ training

When we talk about the ‘tradition’ of Western classical composition, the word implies a more or less unbroken link between its exponents, a body of standardised practices and theories undergoing incremental changes as it passes along a historical chain of teachers and students, occasionally jangled by an outstanding autodidact or savant. In reality, however, composers often learn their trade neither in rigidly academic settings nor in a vacuum, honing their art in educational and professional lives which veer between the musical and the non-musical.

Before music conservatories as we now know them were widely established, Johann Sebastian Bach developed his compositional skills under instruction from his family, in professional settings and through self-directed learning. Robert Schumann started composing as a young law student in Leipzig, but later went on to receive some lessons in counterpoint from the composer and teacher Heinrich Dorn. Hector Berlioz taught himself a good deal of theory as a young boy, although it wasn’t until after he obtained a science degree that he was able to commit himself to studying music academically. Richard Wagner taught himself compositional fundamentals before enrolling at university, where he spent a scant six months under the tutelage of Theodor Weinlig before engaging in a more sustained programme of personal study. The prodigy Amy Beach began composing melodies as a small child, receiving only a year of formal instruction in her late teens.

But as well as these examples, there are composers whose learning in music theory and composition was even less formalised. Here, we take a look at some major composers whose non-traditional paths into the tradition set the standard for would-be musical autodidacts.

Georg Philipp Telemann (1681–1767)

The Baroque master’s musical beginnings were inauspiciously clandestine. Although he received singing and keyboard lessons and taught himself recorder and zither, Georg Philipp Telemann’s early attempts at learning composition by transcribing established works were stifled when his musical possessions were confiscated by his family. They may have considered Telemann’s artistic pursuits to be frivolous, an attitude he apparently absorbed in his attempts to conceal these activities from his classmates when he studied law in Leipzig. It was here, however, that he began composing cantatas for the city’s main churches, a vocation that led to his reputation as one of the leading composers of religious works of his time.

‘The Five’

Casting forward a few centuries, a major instance of informal routes into composition is embodied in the careers of the Russian composers who came to be known as ‘The Five’ or ‘The Mighty Handful’. Comprised of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1833–1908), Alexander Borodin (1833–1887), César Cui (1835–1918) and Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881), the group was marshalled under the mentorship of Mily Balakirev (1837–1910), whose principled opposition to the increasing institutionalisation of musical learning may have derived from his own lack of formalised, systematic grounding in theoretical principles. Nevertheless, along with his emphasis on direct expression and his nationalistic veneration of folk forms, Balakirev imparted his self-taught compositional knowledge to his charges, all of whom came to music via unusual pathways.

Rimsky-Korsakov, the only one of the five to take a professional music post, didn’t begin taking piano lessons until the age of 15. Studying for a career in the Navy, he began composing his First Symphony while at sea. He honed his knowledge through Balakirev’s informal instruction and through his job inspecting military bands, building his career as a composer to the extent that he was invited to become a professor at the St Petersburg Conservatory in 1871 while still a young man, resigning his naval commission two years later. While this put him at odds with the anti-academic Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov himself was insecure about his credentials as a professor, and he sought to rectify this under his own programme of self-directed study while in post.

Cui was born into an army family, and, aside from a few months of harmony and counterpoint lessons from the Polish composer Stanisław Moniuszko, he received no compositional instruction besides some help from Balakirev with orchestration. His main career was as an engineer-general in the army, and he went on to become a lecturer and a special authority on military fortifications.

Tchaikovsky described Borodin as a composer of “very great talent, which, however, has come to nothing for want of instruction, and because blind fate has led him into the science laboratories.” Borodin himself said he was “always slightly ashamed to admit I compose.” The illegitimate son of an aristocrat, Borodin began composing music as a young boy, but his career developed in the direction of research chemistry. Aside from coming into Balakirev’s orbit in 1862, Borodin composed his great works with no training while making scientific discoveries, publishing papers and setting up the first medical course for women in Russia. His somewhat stretched professional responsibilities, compounded by a demanding family life, may have contributed to his premature death at 53.

As a younger man, Borodin had met a dissolute Imperial Guard soldier called Modest Mussorgsky. Like Cui, Mussorgsky came from a military family that sent him off to be a cadet at the age of 13, an experience which became the seed of his lifelong struggles with alcoholism. He had, however, received piano lessons from age six, and his aspirations as a composer were ignited when he came into contact with Balakirev. Their lessons consisted of playing and transcribing works by Beethoven, among others, but their relationship was strained – Balakirev called Mussorgsky “almost an idiot” – and the latter went it alone with his compositions while taking a job in Russia’s civil service. Mussorgsky conjectured that “Maybe I’m afraid of technique because I am poor at it,” yet what was then considered his idiosyncratic, undisciplined approach to composition is now seen as boundary-expanding.

Edward Elgar (1857–1934)

When the 15-year-old Edward Elgar left school to work as a legal clerk, few likely expected him to become the composer who would bring English music back into an international standing it had not enjoyed since the death of Henry Purcell. Elgar’s father was an organist and music dealer, but besides furnishing his son with violin lessons, he was unable to foster his burgeoning compositional tendencies; an intended course of study at Leipzig University was financially out of reach. Most of Elgar’s knowledge was acquired on the job, as he worked as a bandmaster, church organist and in a range of other freelance musical jobs, including a position as ‘composer in ordinary’ at Powick County Lunatic Asylum. Like Rimsky-Korsakov, however, his practical experience provided a lateral route to academic prominence, as he was appointed Birmingham University’s first Professor of Music between 1905 and 1908.

Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951)

A musical innovator for whom his lack of formal training was an inspiration rather than an embarrassment, Arnold Schoenberg’s career is one of the clearest examples of the nonlinear relationships between self-study, traditionalism and exploration. Schoenberg’s father, a Viennese shopkeeper, died when Schoenberg was 16, leading him to take up work at a bank. With no formal training in theory or composition, Schoenberg attained an advanced level of musical competency by performing in string quartets, receiving some mentorship from Alexander von Zemlinsky and early moral and financial support from Mahler and Strauss. 

With a style progressing in the 1900s from extreme chromaticism to atonality, Schoenberg devised his groundbreaking 12-tone serialist technique, becoming a prolific theoretician and teacher to composers including Webern, Berg and John Cage. Schoenberg was self-consciously proud in his autodidacticism, valuing intuition and refusing to teach his students in dogmatic ways, and although he was viewed as an iconoclast, he was convinced his theories were the logical development of the tradition of established authorities – including Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms – whom he venerated.

Tōru Takemitsu (1930–1996)

The exploratory Japanese composer reportedly said that “My first teacher was the radio”. Tōru Takemitsu had been conscripted as a 14-year-old boy toward the end of the Second World War. During this time, he came into contact with musical contraband in the form of a gramophone recording of French chansons played by a military officer (Western music was banned in Imperial Japan). After the war, he worked at an American base, using the opportunity to soak up Western music he heard on the radio. He once described how he would walk through the city listening for the sound of pianos, going to the houses where he could hear them, and asking to play for five minutes. Takemitsu took up composing at 16, and despite having intermittent instruction from the composer Yasuji Kiyose from 1948, he was essentially self-taught. Like Schoenberg, Takemitsu’s non-standard route into composing may well have licensed his acoustic and compositional experimentalism, as well as his status as a theorist embodied in his large collection of published essays.