How Learning To Cook Is Like Composing Music

I love to cook. My favorite part is chopping vegetables and inhaling their aroma as they sauté on the stove.

When I was younger, and when I want to try something new, I would follow recipes.

Often, though, I simply mix together and season what I have on hand.I can do this because I’ve been cooking for more than a decade. So I know—

• What the various ingredients taste like.

• How to cook them using different methods.

• How their flavors combine together.

Now I’m no expert chef or even some Andrew Rea-level home chef (though I’ll gladly binge with Babish any day).

But I have developed a baseline level of discernment: the capacity to judge well in the absence of a recipe, formula, or rubric.

Why Discernment Matters in Cooking and Composing

Developing discernment is one of the highest aspirations for chefs.Discernment liberates your imagination. It helps you know in your gut what will be the effect of your instinctive actions. It frees you to create in moment and instills a quiet, playful confidence.

For those same reasons, it’s also one of the highest aspirations for composers.

But composers often have to develop this discernment despite the theory and composition training they’ve received. Traditional composition pedagogy is filled with superstitions (see my mentor David Rakowski’s catalog of buttstix).

Imagine, if when you were learning how to cook, you had peers and mentors insisting on things like:

• “Your recipe can’t be any good because it has tomatoes in it. Tomatoes are so cliché.”

• “Your recipe is too similar to others to be any good.”

• “You’re not a real chef until you put your own spin on broiling.”

• “Your food doesn’t count because you made it in your home for yourself rather than at a fancy restaurant for paying customers.”

Such superstitions about cooking ingredients and methods rightly seem stupid.

Discernment vs. Superstitions

Superstitions are the opposite of discernment.

Instead of building on your personal experience with materials, superstitions give you a secondhand recipe or rubric whose truth cannot be challenged.

Composers fall for that drivel all. the. time.I would know. As a composer, I fell hard for it for almost a decade.

This is why I created the Wizarding School for Composers—to help other composers and aspiring composers develop real discernment.

With that discernment, my students work with greater fluency and joy all while having greater clarity on what actually moves the needle in making their music vivid, sophisticated, and magical.