The Composing Process -- Editing the Final Draft

For the next several weeks, The Creative will be taking an in-depth look at the steps I go through in composing a piece of music, from first ideas clear through the end of the publishing process.  Realize this is only my process -- this may or may not work for you, so use it only as a guide.  This is the fifth post in the series.

How do you know when a piece of music is "done"?  I've heard George Lucas say that works of art are never completed, they're only abandoned ... but even when they're "abandoned," it has to be for a good reason, right?

With any piece of music I've ever composed, there's always this sense of a piece being at the point where it's as close to the vision I had in my mind as I'm capable of making it.  The more I compose, the closer this final version gets to what I actually have in mind, but it never quite gets all the way there.  Even so, nearly all my pieces eventually reach a place where they're, for want of a better word, "done."

To me, that means the chords are correct and as I want them, the melody notes are in the right place and follow the right contour, and all those miscellaneous marks (the tempi, dynamics, articulations, and other such things) are in the right place.  At that point, I can call a piece of music done, finished, over with.

Can't I?

Oddly enough, even then, the piece may not fully be done.  This very last stage in the actual creation process is the final, cosmetic going-over that turns the piece from a collection of consonant notes into something that looks enough like a piece of actual music that somebody might want to play it.  It's mostly surface things, but it's these surface things that make a player or an editor want to actually spend time with the piece. 

Think of writing something for an English class -- a report, essay, story ... whatever.  You can have the words all in the right place, and the writing itself can be exemplary, but if the whole thing is written in crayon on the back of an envelope, nobody is going to want to take the time to read it (unless, of course, you're an eighteen-month-old prodigy, in which case, crayon on the back on an envelope is doing pretty well).  But, take those same words, type them up, get the spacing and punctuation just right, and suddenly you have something people want to spend time with.

I have a full checklist of things I (or my lovely wife, my official final in-house editor) go over before I ever release a piece to others.  I won't put them all here, but here are just a few things to bear in mind:

• Rhythms -- Does each measure have the right number of beats, and do the beats line up between staves?
• Accidentals -- Do I have accidental sharps, flats, and naturals marked before the right notes?  Have I given cautionary accidentals when there's a quick change from one accidental to the next?
• Articulations -- Are the various accents, bowings, handbell techniques, etc. all in the right place and legible?  Are they in the right position -- between staves, above the notes, below the notes -- and is the spacing good?
• Words -- Are English and Italian instructions clear and legible?  Are they spelled correctly?  Have I mixed English and Italian in the same expression?  Are my performance notes understandable and correctly spelled?
• Piece-specific items -- If it is a handbell piece, is the handbell chart at the beginning legible and correct?  If it's a choral piece, are all the lyrics easy to read and spelled correctly?
• Overall readability -- As I scan over the piece, are there any places where symbols are hard to read because they coincide with a measure?  Are the measures spaced enough, or are the notes cramped?

This is all very general, but taking a small amount of time to ensure all of this is correct can go a long way toward making your piece look its very best, which is vital as we prepare for our next and very, very scary step: submitting the piece for publication.