Dalhousie: Music Composition essay
Short essay (follow the portfolio instructions; roughly 300-500 words)
A short essay submitted as part of the Composition audition for first-year Composition study, alongside a portfolio of works and an interview with the Composition faculty.
What it’s really asking
For applicants wanting to begin Composition in first year, Dalhousie's Music faculty ask for a short essay alongside your portfolio and interview. They want to understand how you think about music: what you are trying to do as a composer and how your submitted works reflect that.
Why they ask it
Composition is selective and faculty-assessed, so the essay lets readers hear the mind behind the scores. It connects your portfolio to your intentions and shows whether you can talk about music with the seriousness the program expects.
Three ways in
Start inside a piece
Anchor the essay in one or two of your own submitted pieces and what you were actually trying to solve in them.
Name your influences
Name the composers, traditions, or sounds you are arguing with or building on, so faculty can place your taste.
Be honest about gaps
Be candid about what you cannot yet do and what you want the program to teach you.
✕ Weak opening
“Music has always been my biggest passion and I cannot imagine my life without it.”
✓ Strong opening
“My string quartet in the portfolio began as an argument with myself about whether silence could carry a phrase.”
I started composing because I could hear music that did not exist yet and could not stand to let it stay silent. I am applying to study composition at Dalhousie because I have reached the edge of what I can teach myself, and I want to be taught the rest with rigor. 1My first real piece was an accident. I was fourteen, fixing a broken upright piano in my grandmother's house, when I discovered that the dead F-sharp above middle C would only sound if I also held the pedal and struck the key twice. 2Instead of getting it repaired, I wrote a short prelude that used the flaw on purpose, a melody that leaned on that stubborn note like a limp leaning on a cane. 3That taught me the thing I still believe most strongly about writing music, which is that limitation is not the enemy of invention but its closest collaborator. The most interesting choices I have made since then came from asking what a specific instrument cannot do, and then writing toward that wall. 4Since then I have written for what I could actually get into a room: a string trio for friends who play unevenly, a piece for two clarinets and a metronome left audible on purpose, an arrangement for the eleven-person ensemble at my school in which the percussionist was also the page-turner. Writing for real, imperfect players taught me to hear voice-leading with my hands and not only on paper, and to fix a passage by sitting beside the violist rather than defending it. 5I have learned a great deal alone, mostly by stealing. I have copied out the opening of Britten's Serenade by hand to understand how a horn can sound like grief, and spent a winter taking apart Caroline Shaw's Partita to see how a human voice becomes a percussion section. 6But copying is not counterpoint, and listening is not orchestration. I can feel where my harmonic language repeats itself and cannot yet name why, and my ear outruns my technique often enough that I lose ideas before I can notate them. I want training in the formal craft I have only approached intuitively: voice-leading I can defend, orchestration I can predict, a vocabulary for what my ear already wants. 7Dalhousie draws me because composition there is taught alongside performers and inside an interview-driven, faculty-close program rather than at a distance. I want to write for players I can rehearse with, sit in on the premiere of my own mistakes, and be told plainly when a passage does not work. 8The broken F-sharp still does not work, and my grandmother still will not fix it. I think that is why I keep writing. The instrument in my head is always slightly out of tune with the one in the room, and composition is the work of closing that distance, one defensible bar at a time. I am ready to do that work seriously, and I would like to learn how to do it well. 9
- 1Answers the implicit question (why composition, why now, why here) in two plain sentences. Dalhousie rewards specific, program-fit motivation, so the essay states its purpose before telling any story.
- 2Grounds the essay in a single concrete origin scene with an exact, physical detail (the broken F-sharp, the doubled strike). Evidence and texture over adjectives, which is what the school prizes.
- 3Shows a composer's instinct: turning a constraint into material rather than a problem. This reveals a working creative philosophy without claiming to have one.
- 4States a genuine compositional value and immediately frames it as something practiced, not theorized. This is the evidence-led seriousness composition faculty look for in an applicant.
- 5Demonstrates practical, collaborative experience with concrete forces and constraints, complementing the portfolio. The willingness to revise beside a player signals coachability, which conservatory faculty reward.
- 6Names specific scores and what each taught, proving self-directed study with rigor rather than asserting passion. Particularity here reads as authentic musical literacy.
- 7Names precise technical gaps (harmony, orchestration, notation speed) and frames them as reasons to study, signaling exactly the trainable seriousness the program wants.
- 8Specific, researched program-fit reasoning (proximity to performers, small faculty-close setting, the audition interview itself). This targeted motivation is what Dalhousie rewards over generic enthusiasm.
- 9Returns to the opening image and turns it into a definition of the craft, giving the essay shape. Closes on disciplined intent rather than vague passion, matching the school's preference for evidence and seriousness.
Stuck? Start here
- What problem were you trying to solve in your strongest submitted piece?
- Which composers or traditions does your music argue with or grow from?
- What specific skill do you most need formal training to develop?
Before you submit
- Does it tie directly to the works in your portfolio?
- Does it name real influences and a real compositional intention?
- Does it show you can discuss music critically, including your own weaknesses?
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