How to Become a Composer
Join us for Carlisle Floyd’s Of Mice and Men, a Butler Studio production, in the Wortham Theater Center’s Cullen Theater, on March 13 at 7 p.m. and March 15 at 2:30 p.m. More info here.
HGO’s Opera to Go! program will tour Mary Carol Warwick’s The Velveteen Rabbit from March through June, 2026. Grades Pre-K-5. Bring the opera to your school or community space! More info here.
You don’t become a composer overnight. It takes time to establish a solid musical foundation and hone your craft. And it doesn’t hurt to work with the best. The prolific composer and librettist Mary Carol Warwick knows this well, as 40 years ago, she became a student of Carlisle Floyd, and carried his mentorship with her throughout her entire career.
Known as the father of American opera, Floyd wrote 13 operas, including his 1970 adaptation of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. That opera is coming to HGO this March in a production featuring a cast of young artists from the company’s Sarah and Ernest Butler Houston Grand Opera Studio program.
The performance is part of The Carlisle Floyd Centennial (CF100), a multi-year national initiative honoring his legacy through performances, scholarship, exhibitions, and education. Floyd—a composer, librettist, and educator—played a crucial role in HGO history, writing a series of world premieres for the company and helping to co-found the Butler Studio with former general director David Gockley.
In 1981, Warwick was a budding young composer. She knew she wanted to work with Floyd after meeting him and seeing his masterpiece Susannah. He only took six students a year at the University of Houston, where he taught composition. After Warwick reached out to him, he accepted her as a student, and she and her then-husband moved to Houston so she could pursue her post-doctorate at UH. Floyd became a mentor to her, helping her to navigate the difficult journey of becoming an opera composer herself.
“I will always, always, always give him the credit for taking the raw material and molding me into something more than just a person out of academia,” says Warwick. Their friendship lasted four decades, until Floyd passed away in 2021.
Under Floyd’s guidance, Warwick composed 10 children’s operas for HGO—including her 2004 work The Velveteen Rabbit, which the company brought back in 2015 and is again producing this spring through its Opera to Go! program. Looking back on her fruitful career, Warwick offered five valuable lessons she learned from Floyd.
1. The libretto comes first.
“I always do what I learned from him: I start at the very beginning and write from the libretto, all the way through to the end. I learned that the reason to do this is to have a cohesive connection, so that the music flows from one part to another.”
2. You can’t imitate.
“You have to find your inner voice. I didn’t have a voice that was my own because I was learning from others. I was writing like the people that my professors had said I should learn from. When I came to Floyd and brought him two or three of my pieces, he just said very bluntly, this is wastepaper basket music. (laughs) And the thing is, I agreed with him.”
3. If at first you don’t succeed, try again.
“I was complaining about one time when I had to rewrite something. I said, well, I spent so much time on it. He walked over to his bookcase in his studio, and he touched this stack, and said, Well, these are the 13 rewrites from the brothel scene in Of Mice and Men. But David Gockley convinced me—and he was right—that it had nothing to do with the story. So what could I say? I rewrote it. I had no argument.”
4. Know your worth.
“I remember there was one publishing company that wanted to distribute some of my music and to record it in Budapest with some unknown orchestra. There was a fee, so I would have to pay for the orchestra. I took it to Carlisle and asked him if I should do it. He looked at it and threw it down on the desk and said, this is a vanity press. I’d never heard of the term. He gave me good advice about guiding me in my career choices.”
5. Use your maiden name.
“He would give me personal advice, too, if I asked him. For instance, when I came to him in ’81 at the University of Houston, I was registered at Florida State University with my married name. Carlisle said, Wait a minute, that’s not your maiden name? He said, if you become known, do you want to be known as your ex-husband’s last name? You want his name to go forward, or do you want yours?”