Mother, do you think they’ll try to break my balls?—Roger Waters

Honesty. Openness. Privacy. Persona. Self-censorship. If you’re ever going to find your voice, you must be willing to either build a wall and export an avatar with an exquisitely crafted message or be ready to live with the consequences. Voices must be raw, open expressions of the speaker’s inner truth. There are no other paths for a voice to travel—any meandering delays its arrival. Voices face stifling from far too many other external forces, both conscious and unconscious, for artists to waste time doing it to themselves. Of course, different people have different levels of comfort regarding inevitable consequences such as loss of income, social ostracism, stagnating career advancement, religious damnation, fewer followers, falling stock prices, death threats, assassination—you name it. There are worse things than being canceled. We live in a time when a joke can get someone slapped on national television or instantly fired from a desperately needed job. How does one prevent a voice from suffering from long-term PTSD? 

Empire building and the act of colonization stifle voices. Some feel the burden of suppression when honorable attempts to hear from various voices cause a historically dominant voice to have to shut up and LISTEN for a change. Some are born through no fault of their own into a profoundly religious social construct and have to learn how to navigate within it to survive and flourish. It’s a wonder that individual voices ever breakthrough, and it’s no wonder that some voices take a long time to blossom fully. 

Ralph Vaughan Williams was not born into an obscenely wealthy family. Still, they were well off enough to send young Ralph to boarding school, with his eventual destination being the Royal College of Music and Trinity College, Cambridge. He studied formally but kept a love of popular folk music and a decidedly middle-brow approach to his entire life. He consistently conducted choral ensembles for amateurs and wrote music for all levels of performers, including young students. While having a working knowledge of modernist music and academic trends, he only expressed them occasionally in his music. His Symphony No. 4 stands out because it is one of his only symphonic works without a defined inspiration. He considered it absolute music. When a composer writes music this way, what "voice" is he using? When I listen to Symphony No. 4, I still hear Vaughan Williams, which is remarkable.

The instant when other voices are added to that one voice is an instant of metamorphosis. Thereafter his identity is not that of the inner self alone but the identity of a group. The drama and the intimacy of the individual are superseded by a different esthetic or sociological quality. —Harry Partch, from Genesis of a Music (1949)

For a composer with a voice so ensconced in amber in the British mind, Vaughan Williams did write music in multiple styles for different situations and different audiences with varying levels of success. When Vaughan Williams, late in life, composed one of his few full-blown dramatic operas, The Pilgrim's Progress, he lamented that it wasn't well-received because it didn't feature a traditional love story or pair of dueling protagonists.

One work, though, The Lark Ascending, was so well-received that it is still used with the same type of vigorous political zeal as Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. by those who have no concern for the voice of the person who uttered the expression. To this day, the progressively minded Vaughan Williams is held up as a beacon of conservative British values, partly because his musical voice is more traditional. 

Raven Chacon's voice is heavily influenced by heavy metal and the experimental noise music he was surrounded by in his youth. One album opened up a world of possibility for him with its wild fluctuations of style, form, and timbre—Disco Volante (1995) by the experimental rock band Mr. Bungle. When he decided to pursue a composition degree at the University of New Mexico, he discovered how focused on vocation and job training state universities can be. While Chacon would continue to teach after graduation, he was always more interested in promoting creativity through composition than training to become a college professor. Chacon continues to work with students just learning to read music, teaching them how to create THEIR music from the beginning. 

When Chacon chose a graduate school, he chose an art school and earned a graduate degree in fine art, not composition. Consequently, his voice expresses itself through various performance art and visual media forms. While chamber ensembles often commission him to write "notes on paper," Chacon is also quite at home making sound installations for sculptures and creating real-time improvisational electronic music and noise art. Many of Chacon's commissions are for instruments he has never written for before. He's successful at it because the people who make the commission are often looking for something modern and know that Chacon will approach his work with an artist's sense of wonder and experimentation. 

As I struggle to find my voice as a composer, I often think about whether an emerging voice has to be NEW by definition. If we are all unique individuals, then isn't each of our voices unique by definition. I feel a kinship with both of these composers, which is why I've chosen to study their music in detail to try to discover how their voices reached fruition. Like Chacon, I grew up in a part of the country where heavy metal reigned supreme in the culture. Progressive popular music has always fascinated me, although my interests never extended into avant-garde noise as far as Chacon’s did. Like Vaughan Williams, I maintain a "cheerful agnosticism" and progressive political mindset while remaining smitten with the melodic elements of the sacred music I sang as a child raised in the Baptist church. I was also exposed to Bach's music and listened intently to his contrapuntal fireworks before I learned how to read a note. Like both composers, teaching was and still is an integral part of my musical identity, even though the way I approach the activity has changed dramatically over the years. I even played my fair share of Vaughan Williams' music as a student in my high school and college days. No one gets out of a 5A high school band in Texas without playing his Folk Song Suite or Toccata Marziale. 

These similarities combine with my differences to make up what must become my musical voice. As I identify and develop areas of technical deficiency, a voice will resolve into focus, even if by mimicry alone. Critics could argue that the filmmaker Quentin Tarantino isn’t original or new since he makes examples of well-defined genre films. Still, they are HIS versions of those genres, even if he isn’t reinventing the wheel every time he writes a script. Why should composing music be any different? If you are reading this series and are concerned about finding YOUR voice, I can offer the following advice, the distillation of my explorations, but I don’t claim that it is a unique nugget of wisdom. I’ve heard it from countless others and only pass it along as another link in a long chain.

Write often. 

Express freely and deeply. 

Continue to take in more than you put out. 

and finally, learn how to manage, for your unique situation, the consequences of your expressions without stifling them. Remember that most of us continue to need input to survive and thrive, so contribute in any way you can. If the rest of us hold up our end, there will be enough for you to take in and thrive.