The Schillinger School of Music

Jeremy Arden began to study the work of Joseph Schillinger in 1992 and completed a PhD thesis on the subject of composing using the Schillinger system in 1997. He has been teaching the System since that time and incorporates it into his courses at Morley college in London and the University of Hertfordshire.

Arden has had an extensive career as a freelance composer working in various fields including film, theatre and concert music. He enjoys collaborating with artists in different mediums while pursuing a daring individual mode of expression. His music is full of contrast: rhythmic energy is complimented by a delicate lyricism and ironic wit.

You can hear Jeremy Arden’s music in the Gallery of this web site.
Click here for a clip of Bayo's Way
Jeremy Arden's music is published by Edition HH.

For more information about Jeremy Arden’s music go to the living composers project

Why study The Schillinger System of Musical Composition?

Intellect or imagination?

To the newcomer, The Schillinger System of Musical Composition (SSMC) often appears to be a fascinating and complex puzzle of pattern and geometry but one that fails to engage them as musicians. It seems counter to intuition, instinct and feeling. Surely, music arises spontaneously, in the mind's ear of the composer. Intellectual skills might be of use after this event but the big idea comes from deep inside not from the conscious, planning, strategising brain. How do the formulae of the SSMC connect to that intuitive imagination?
I offer my own experience by way of an answer to these questions. After many years studying the SSMC, I can definitely say that I feel far closer to my intuitive imagination and more able to listen-in to my inner ear. Before I discovered Schillinger’s work, music was a beautiful mystery but a frustrating one; composing was often a matter of groping in the dark, something like being a carpenter, inspired to make furniture but disabled through lack of tools. After a long period of assimilating the technical ideas of SSMC, I have reached a point where technique is aligned with my instinctive working practice: music is still beautiful but the work of composing is usually more pleasurable and the mystery has a greater purity.

Approach

To begin with, one must simply understand and work with the formulae and techniques offered in the SSMC. At first, the products of this work can seem wooden and unmusical but later, the constraints imposed by a technique begin to nourish the imagination; necessity is the mother of invention. Strict adherence to process provokes the imagination, partly because of the imposed limitations but also because a particular technique provides a certain outcome, which can be elegantly adapted to a musical purpose. The SSMC prepares the way for future creative freedom and is well worth the time and effort required to master it. Once a threshold of understanding has been crossed, it is, in my experience, possible to compose freely and spontaneously from the imagination drawing on formulae or procedures whenever they are appropriate. If the above seems somewhat opaque, then I suggest you study the System for its own sake, for its novelty and because it may answer some questions you have always asked about the way music works.
Schillinger has been criticised for his eccentricity, his excessive claims and his extraordinary criticisms of the work of great composers. I recommend that the reader forgives these anomalies and accepts them as the product of an excessively rigorous and even obsessional mind, that produced many magnificent insights and original ideas, which far outweigh the occasional flaw.



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The Schillinger School of Music is grateful for the support of Rosalie Coopman.