I've been thinking for a while on the subject of revising pieces and what the process of revision, for me, entails, but didn't start crystallizing my thoughts until I read a recent piece by my colleague Joe Eidson.
Stravinsky revised works - despite any grandiose claims to the contrary - in order to stay ahead of copyright law curves. Brahms was a frequent reviser of completed works, predominantly in order to rectify juvenile indiscretions, as he put it, and clarify rhythms. Messiaen rarely revised works, favoring a process of slow, complete, thoughtful work that would be satisfactory. Villa Lobos never revised - it is a shame he and poet Frank O'Hara never crossed paths. Duparc would revise the same work for years before releasing it to the wider world. Other extreme examples are in the forms of Sibelius or Barber, who burned earlier works or demanded unsatisfactory works withdrawn. Hovhaness went so far as to destroy every work he composed during his student period, dissatisfied with his output and criticisms from peers and teachers.
Upon reflection, I safely do not belong to any of these camps. Revising, for me, has a peculiar twofold definition: the first dimension of this is the perennial divide - and internal battle between - of "pencil" versus "engraver;" the second aspect is a consideration of when, and how, or if, a work becomes complete.
Like every composer who started writing before home computers and cheap keyboards became commonplace, my first works were wrought by paper and pencil, and the final version (or in intrepid days, the first!) became ink and paper. Moving forward fifteen years, all of my pieces still start life on paper, but very few end their lives that way. Still, I have a handful of works - primarily solo or small chamber works - that are not performance-ready as they are still in my admittedly disheveled handwriting, and they have remained on the shelf for years. I have returned to a few of these, and in the process of entering them into engravers in order to create a legible meekness as opposed to an illegible tawdriness, I have made changes to content, motives, pitches, or rhythms; in a few extreme examples (see this post of mine, especially regarding a future "violin and piano" work), I have completely reworked the material, or added a substantial amount in order to radically alter the scope or focus or purpose of the work. This has been the case, though, for a few direct-to-engraver works of mine as well: every few years 'round submission-time for contests, I'll see some glaring, if only cosmetic, errors in a work in need of correction.
This opens up a few questions for consideration: what needs correcting? what am I comfortable releasing to the wider world? is there a window of time acceptable as a difference between when the pencil first hits the paper and when a performer receives the score? Obviously, cosmetic blemishes need attention: a slightly-misplaced dynamic marking, adding additional performance directions, shifting the placement of a hairpin... these are all small things to take care of (I'm not big on tedium.) Whether a melodic line needs resculpting or a harmonic sentence needs clarification is far less immediately apparent and much more intuitive, and this depends upon how much time I spend in the process of putting lipstick on a pig. I do have a number of works that have sat in "completed" pencil-sketch form - works I'm sure I could pass in front of performers and enjoy performances without having to wrest away the sounds - for many years, some as old as 8 years. Should I just withdraw these works and pretend they never happened? No: in short, this would deny I ever attempted to create the work; further, there may come the time when I finally do have the necessity to edit or "complete" the works electronically. Yes, this inhibits my ability to get some performances - but not tremendously so, and with odd combinations like harp, flute, percussion, and piano, my performance chances are only slightly diminished by having a penciled-in score rather than an engraved PDF. This is not to say, however, that even works completed in Finale are veritably complete.
So, what is complete? Is it, as I was taught to think, that a piece is complete when I am satisfied with the shape, the pacing, the dramatic curve, the orchestration? Or is it finished when every dynamic marking is 8 pixels south and 3 pixels west of its corresponding notehead; is it finished when every solitary machination of engraving is done? Is it complete once we have a performance and are satisfied that there is nothing to rectify or redo? When is it possible to set aside the score and assume that lessons learned from Piece A should be applied to Piece B instead of taking said lessons and reinserting them to fix the errors, small as they are, in Piece A? Idiosyncratically, complete is when I get tired of fidgeting with the details of the work, when it is clear to me that the energy spent in rectifying some perceived sonic or notational injustices would be better served working on some other project. This varies, piece to piece, considering many of the factors above as well as the plain intangible of how proud I am of the work, especially if I'm privileged to hear a performance of it or work closely with its performers. Dealing with electroacoustic music, there is a bit of a difference - all of the work aside from loose sketches happens within the machine, and revisions are more concerned with how I control and use the space - there's no going back on source material or re-producing sounds - with a few attempts in my time to retrofit stereophonic works for 4 or 8 channels (but never in reverse).
I also routinely, casually, and perhaps cavalierly apply the term "revision" to practically any piece underway (this can number from 5 to 20, depending on how honest I'm feeling that day) that has lain dormant for more than a few weeks, so there's that.
As I've previously mentioned, each of my pieces that comes to some sort of finality of presence is like one of my creative offspring, and at some point I have to let go, no matter how disappointed I am in how it turned out. For this reason alone, I may end up either the world's best or worst parent.
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