thoughts on process

Note: I've taken a break from posting new entries over the past week as my time has been equally split between composing and watching Al Jazeera's coverage of the Lotus Revolution (or so it has been dubbed by Saad Ibrahim) unfolding in Alexandria, Cairo, and Suez. Watching a populist revolt and all-but-overthrow of a tyrant takes precedence over slathering my nonsensical musings all over the Internet.

Nonetheless, I don't want it to look like I've abandoned this blog (again), and I'll bring you a few more entries this week. The first one deals with process, or, rather, my process of late when composing multimovement works. Later this week, I'll bring you such nuggets as a long-overdue record review (haven't written one in a while), and a comparison between 3D video technology, air traffic control, and electroacoustic music. Other entries, of course, ad libitum, including more thoughts on multimovement work.

I write long pieces. Let me just get that out there. Granted, not all of of my works are long. I have a fair number of works that clock in under the industry-standard (and contest-standard) ten-minute mark. I just happen to be a composer who, despite idolizing Ravel's music in my early years, never took to heart Ravel's repeated statements railing against - gently or not - excessive development.¹ There are some reasons for this, but I won't get into all of them here. The biggest reason, perhaps, comes out of my process: I envision multimovement works much more easily than I do single-movement forms.²

Part of this is associated with my process, or one that I've seen develop over the past few years regarding multimovement works. When I started composing, and for the next eight or so years until an epistemological and stylistic shift about five years ago, I started working on a piece from the beginning and went straight to the end. I collected my sketches, started at the first measure of the first movement and progressed linearly until the very end of the piece came about. Over my last few multimovement works (the viola concerto, inflection points, and so forth), I have noticed a trend: after sketches get set down, the sketches becoming more like fragmentary pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to reconfigure and reshape - is it cheating to cut off the nibs and corners? - I tend to start writing chunks of the first movement, and then set it aside and start working on the second or other internal movements, leaving those sketches somewhat fragmentary. Typically, the final movement is the first movement to come to fruition in full without serious immediate revision or clean-up; the interior movement(s) ends up being the one I work on last. Somewhere in the middle remains the first movement. Gone are the days of writing perfectly linearly and going back to repair the damage, linearly. (Please note that I do remain faithful, largely, to primordial conceptions of form and design in pieces and that I do typically conceive of a structure - which I treat as fairly liquid - before I put the piece together.)

This does a few things conceptually and intellectually. Intellectually, it seems to make the piece much more organic and holistic, and creates a stronger sense of unity across movements. By using materials derived from a chunk (typically the opening) of the opening movement, the final movement presents all of the possible materials in a largely developed form, and I can take those materials - including those established on the fly for transitional or contrasting passages - and use those to create the interior movement or movements, as well as presenting prototypical (or developed) forms of the material in the opening movement.

The problem I had with composing linearly was that I didn't know where to go: I didn't know how to finish a multimovement work, and I doggedly, indefatigably kept up writing in the start-to-finish manner that seemed too formulaic and seemed to exhaust me. Moreover, looking at my earlier multimovement forms in depth (which I am not wont to do, believe me) shows a sort of thematic wandering: pitch systems may remain the same, rhythmic mottoes may remain if only subtly, but new material would pop up in the first movement that wouldn't show up anywhere else; or, worse, new material would arise in the final portion of the work and seem to be unrelated or only tangentially related to other material, which often made the work seem unfocused or unpolished.

Since I'm prone to writing multimovement works - and am at work at several such pieces simultaneously at the moment - the new system I fell into intuitively seems to work much better: the finished works seem much more unified, and the dramatic arc of the work seems to be much more satisfying: there's a greater sense of departure and return.

This process seems to do something else as well: it limits me from going overboard with material. When composing fully linearly, I had the tendency in early drafts of pieces to just, well, take off in a straight line, tornado-like, gathering up more and more and more material and dispensing with too much, too liberally. Oddly enough, this is not at all how I approach electroacoustic works. With the exception of critical mass, my giant 40-minute-plus fixed media sonic rant, my entire goal is to use as few source materials as possible when composing a stereo, quad, or 8-channel work. My intermedia pieces (so far) rely only on the sounds made by the performer, whether recorded or processed live. There's plenty I can do with a seventeen-second sample of a garbage truck. When writing acoustic or conventional music, in the days of old, I would fill sheet after sheet of staff paper with ideas and try to pick and choose. Perhaps it's discipline, perhaps it's something else; still, it's always been easier for me to derive from extant material, to expand small pieces of material and ideas, than it is to pick and choose from a plethora of ideas and considerations.

Retrospectively, this seems like a no-brainer: approach composing like a trade-paperback suspense novel. Come up with a solid opening; using these ideas and themes, arrive at an ending that seems to tie up all the loose ends. Go back and fill everything else in. But, I don't think a lot of composers, especially younger ones, know or understand that they can write pieces "out of order". So far, it's worked well for me. Best of all, it seems to help expedite composing: the pieces of that jigsaw fall into place much more easily, but not in a formulaic fashion, and much more quickly once the pieces gather inertia.

Thoughts? I've thought about the idea of trying to write a piece starting from the middle, or pulling a Steven King and writing backward. I also have other ideas using sheer process procedures to create forms, but perhaps later: the primary consideration is creating a musically sound (no pun intended), appealing, smart piece that challenges everyone in the room. Once I manage to do that, I'll start toying with different means of creating works.

*****

1. Despite his own objections to developing themes and motives, and while he was a strident formal classicist, I can't see repeated thematic presentations and reorchestrations of themes in Daphnis et Chloë, at the very least, as anything but forms of development. But that's an intellectual conversation for another time.
2. I plan on talking about multimovement forms and their place and necessity later on. Stay tuned! Maybe?