After getting sidetracked doing arrangements of Motown music I’ve gotten back to working on a big band composition I started a couple of months ago. Right now I’m at a stage in the work that I tend to enjoy the most. There is still some original material that needs to be composed and there are still a lot of details to work out in it, but the basic source material for my ideas has been written (and modified) and the overall road map is charted out. It’s fun because there’s enough completed to get a good idea now how the completed chart will sound, while still having enough uncertainty to be intriguing. I sort of think of this part of my process as working on a jigsaw puzzle. I’ve got the pieces (the motives, basic melody, harmonic progression, etc) and sort of an idea how they need to go together, but some of the pieces are still missing and I need to craft them as I go.
Which leads me to the issue I’m struggling with right now, and one that I think is common for a lot of composers. As the puzzle is coming together I can see that I’ve got some pieces that don’t match the rest. Sometimes when this happens to me the best solution is to compose a better transition between material or add some new music between to make for a better fit. With the piece I’m working on right now, I’ve realized that my composition is simply better without it. I had grown attached to these 8 measures and spent a lot of time working on getting it to sound right, so it was hard for me to toss it aside to the composition notebook.
Here’s a thought for you composers to consider while you’re working on your next piece. Instead of conceptually putting pieces together to create your work, think about how you can be creative by taking things away. Rather than a jigsaw puzzle, you’re chipping away at a block of marble. Just as a marble sculpture can be created by removing all the parts that don’t resemble an horse, you can let your composition emerge by putting down a lot of ideas and then removing the ones that don’t fit.
Working with this idea in mind has yielded some interesting results for me. Not only have I gotten rid of the transition problem I was having, but by pulling notes out of a rhythmic motive I was exploring I was able to make other transition sections more interesting. Sometimes the best composing you can do is done with an eraser.
Really enjoying your composition posts. This one calls to mind that “less is more” phrase of Mies van der Rohe. Also Bernstein’s recordings from Beethoven’s notebook of passages left out/reworked in the 5th Symphony. If memory serves, what got left in was nearly always more succinct – Bernstein used the word “inevitable” to describe how one passage leads to another. This all ties in nicely with your mention in the previous post about how “this cell has a particular mood”. Part of the puzzle can be figuring out how that mood plays out musically, and then leaving out extraneous material.