If this was asked 30 years ago the answer would have been a definite "yes". But I've had a change of heart about it, especially in electronic music, that has gradually separated instrumental facility with composition, that I am loosely defining as a "logical temporal arrangement of sound" (or illogical in the avant-garde). I have operated in both departments of traditional through-composed forms to ambient music. Both are areas where composition can occur. As others here have expressed, anything you can bang on is technically an instrument, but the point of distinction is whether you can write music that can be played by other people. I have written for strings, but I don't play any instruments in the viol family. If you fully understand the characteristics of an instrument (ranges and so on) as well as the technical level of the players, you might be able to live up to the title.
More important than playing the instrument is making the instructions that others follow, which means knowing notation at the highest level. But contemporary composition is a different animal that doesn't require "instruments" as we know them traditionally. In that world, instruments are secondary to timbre, which is in most cases completely synthetic and virtual, and is more of a visual art in how it is constructed.
Comments