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 third post in the series.
So now you have your seed of an idea, and you've played around with it, exploring it in all its glory, taking it out for a test drive to see what it can really do. Hopefully, through this process, you've started to get some idea of how you can structure this idea -- and all the subsequent ideas you came up with whilst playing around -- into a unified whole piece.
Notice I didn't say you knew exactly where every note would go, and exactly how every aspect of the piece would sound. This is something some would-be Creatives struggle with: they believe that until they have the whole and final glorious image of their creation in mind, they aren't able to put stroke or word or note one on paper. They seem to think that the very act of writing it down will somehow sully their clear, perfect artistic vision.
I'm not sure I've ever had a "perfect artistic vision," and by most standards, I'm still an okay composer. In fact, I'd go so far as to state that if you do wait for that "perfect artistic vision" to come to you, you'll have a long wait ahead of you, and will likely only ever create two or three pieces in your lifetime.
What I do have when I start my rough drafts is not a perfect vision, but rather a fair idea of where I'm starting and what direction I'd like to go. Part of the joy of the rough draft is in the exploration and the journey, never quite knowing what lies around the next turn, the next bar line, but knowing that it is something exciting.
To put it in terms of vacations: the perfect artistic vision is the organized tour, where everything is organized well in advance and you only have to go through the motions of the experience; the "starting point and vague direction" approach is the road trip where you set out and take whatever detours strike your fancy along the way, letting your whims dictate when and where you go.
When I'm starting a rough draft, I do one of two things: I sit down with manuscript paper and piano and sketch out four or eight or sixteen bars of music, or I sit down at my computer and open Finale. I know that all rough drafts will end on the computer, but each piece starts off differently, and sometimes I need the feel on an actual acoustic instrument under my fingers to get the ball rolling.
When I do get to the computer, my process is almost a "brain dump" -- I take all my ideas and throw them into the program. At the rough draft stage, too many ideas are better than not enough. Even as they write their rough drafts, many Creatives think they can't put down a note unless it's absolutely perfect. This doesn't happen.
I routinely axe whole sections of pieces, or change notes or chords, or rearrange sections. Finale is much like a word processor, but for music: cutting, changing, moving, pasting -- all are easy to do and free me up to worry about just getting the ideas down, secure in the knowledge that I can change it up later with minimum fuss.
I tend to do all my rough draft work in "scroll view" in Finale, where the measures are strung end to end in one straight, continuous line. Doing the rough draft in "page view" -- what it will look like on the printed page -- is just too much hassle, as I would constantly be moving measures around and having to worry about things like page breaks and crowded measures. All of that formatting stuff comes later on in the process -- the rough draft is about the music and the music alone.
As I start to progress further in the piece, the ultimate destination will frequently begin to present itself. Even when it doesn't, the piece leads me onward, and all I need to do is follow. Usually in less time than I would have imagined, I'm arriving at the end of a piece, or at least an end to the piece. Again, at this stage, I won't know if it will actually be the end or not, and at this stage, I don't really care. When I roll in here, the rough draft stage is done, and I usually take a break, both because I need it, and because pieces turn out better when you give them a little distance between the rough draft stage and the final draft stage.
One last word about playing with the music and rough drafts: I have separated these two steps in the process for purposes of writing about them in this blog, but in actual practice, I frequently combine the two. I'll sit down with Finale as I play with the piece, and when I hit upon something that I like, I'll put it in the program so it's saved for later. Many of these jottings grow and grow and become whole sections of the piece. Don't feel as if you need to keep the steps separate and pristine for the composing process to work. Composing, like life, is organic, and follows its own will, not some set of predefined steps.
On Wednesday, we'll talk about the next step in the process, the First Final Draft (yes, there are more than one "Final" drafts). Until then, keep creating, and have a great week.
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