This is something directors and all creative types really need to see.

When composing it is normal to have doubts about the quality of your ideas, but in the business of music on demand and tight schedules, you need an approach to deal with that and make the best decisions.

This is how I deal with it

1. I brainstorm.

I have a variety of ways of doing this: at the keys, the guitar, often just walking around the house or my studio or, if ideas are slow in coming, I do laundry or a few chin-ups, anything to clear my mind and get into “play mode”. When brainstorming I find it important to just have fun.

Figuring out under what circumstances I get my best ideas is something I spent quite a lot of time figuring out, and it was not time ill spent. I never get the blank page syndrome anymore.

2. Pick your favourite.

I do this right away and I don’t wait for the next day. I make a few choices and if I have doubts about the best one to choose as I play through them, I will do a rough sequence and then sit back and listen.

If I still have doubts I will stop for a bit, do something completely unrelated to clear my head and get some distance from it, then I come back in 10 minutes or so and sit back and listen.

Even with tight deadlines, taking a short break is important, it makes everything else go much, much faster and smoother.

And let’s face it, if you have doubts about the quality of your idea, it will nag at you as you work.

Furthermore, I am sure this has happened to you; you think your idea is great, you write the whole thing in a heat of passion only to find that it is quite lame when you listen again the next day. Time completely wasted.

Having experienced that a few times, even when I think I am sure I have doubts!

So even when you think you are sure, taking a few minutes or a day to get distance and the come back to your idea with a fresh ear is an important part of the process.

Today I am writing a little 45 second ditty for my next project (more on that soon) and I had to take a break, get some distance from two ideas that I have to choose from – so I wrote this post!

Later,

Alain

What is fluency?

You have to be in touch with your muse, of course, know how to call her at will, and have the musical knowledge, skill and experience to do something with it.

Like Brahms said:

“Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind”

But an important and seldom discussed aspect of fluency is the ability to self-edit on the spot.

Here is a great read on this very subject.

I enjoy reading about copy writing because there are many parallels between copy writing and composing for film.

I have gained many insights reading about copy writing that I have applied to composition, and also to my writing of words, which I also enjoy doing.

And of course, fluency requires that you put your nose to the grindstone, as the saying goes, which is where I should be right this minute instead of writing this post!

So off I go.

Well, this is taking a while, isn’t it? I never imagined for a second that the last song would be hard to write at all.

But it is.

The first thing was finding a style of music that both me and the director were happy with, something that has a big finale feel to it. A nice big happy party.

I remember this video on Jerry Goldsmith where he talks about spending a week just listening to Native Indian music as he got ready to score a film. Just immersing himself in the sounds and colours before he started writing.

So that is what I am doing now. Not Indian music of course, but rock, rockabilly and funk.

There are a lot of ideas written down right now and piling up fast, but for this song I have to go with the great idea. The great, simple idea.

“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.” – Frederic Chopin

I am looking for that idea that makes me go “aha”,the idea that fits the many criteria required, and I didn’t get that yet, not quite. I feel myself getting closer, though.

And the funny thing is, that once the song is done, it will feel so easy and natural.

I also need to get started on the underscore soon!

Monday I started work on the pre-production music for the animated feature I am scoring. I wrote the first song on Monday, the ballad, which I thought I would have a hard time with. So I approached it with intense effort, brainstormed, and after a day of hard toil I had the whole song written.

And then, an hour before the family was set to return, something hit me and I re-wrote the song completely in about 20 minutes, and I knew that was the one!

I recorded it and sent it off on Tuesday and it got approved. The director, the producer, his team, everyone loved the music, my wife cried while listening to it, what a great start! (This being the first piece of music for the film, it was important to make a good first impression!)

Then it was time for the second song which I thought would be a breeze. I had the idea for the chorus already, you see. It had come to me on Monday during lunch and thankfully I had some manuscript paper (never leave the studio without it!) so I wrote it down right away.

On Tuesday I still remembered the tune perfectly, which indicated to me that it was memorable. So when I sat down to work on it on Wednesday, I thought, I already have the chorus and it’s a killer! I’ll just start with a verse, do the chorus, modulate twice, it’ll be a breeze.

I even woke up and was playing through it in my head while taking a shower and it sounded great! But I sat down at the piano and it started all sounding too… country.

That wasn’t going to fit. How depressing.

But as soon as I detached myself from the idea (and that took a while) I realized what parts worked and what parts needed fixing up, and within a few minutes I had a version that rocked.

Now, the problem I am having is the form. I have goals for the form and it has to work dramatically within the context of this ending.

Sure, this second song is giving me problems, but that’s fine, I embrace them! Bring ‘em on.

Because, after all, you can’t have solutions without problems.

Have you ever had the feeling you could have done more? After a few hours of work, you look at the music and think, my God, is that it? Is that all I wrote?

I get that feeling, and I know I can do more. A lot more.

Sure, there are lots of creativity helping devices, all helpful to varying degrees. but something that is just as important to composition is the art of managing the rest of your life.

Because if your daily affairs are bothering you then your mind is not clear, and since musical ideas come from a silence within, then having your mind buzzing is really no help at all.

So what do we composers need to have a clear, music-ready state of mind?

• A clean studio or working environment
• A well organized to-do list that we can rely on so that we do not have to think about what needs to be done as we do the most important thing: composing
• A clear plan of the project we are working on
• Reliable help in handling business matters

These are all important, especially when working on your own project. But one productivity device is even more powerful than these.

An important deadline from an outside source.

Because nothing makes you more productive than when you have this great big deadline looming and that your work is going to be heard by tons of people.

The irony is that we work at our highest degree of stress-free productivity when faced with a crisis, and for artists a deadline is pretty much a crisis, isn’t it?

But what if it is your own project? Is it possible to impose your own deadline and live by it?

It is so easy to start judging what you write as you write it, and you really shouldn’t.

Of course you should consider technical aspects during composition, things like form and counterpoint and motivic development, that sort of thing. What you shouldn’t do is ask yourself “is this good”? It’s too early for that.

Judging slows down writing to a snail’s pace. Judging hinders creativity. Judging should come after, not during composition.

I know this, but still, this is what has been happening to me lately, and I know it is partly because of fear.

Fear of my music being bad.

I want my music to be worthy of living in the same universe as Bach, Stravinsky and Ravel, a worth-while goal for sure (I mean, what else should I aim form?) but this can sometimes result in a bit of pressure…

So to break the habit I started doing what I think of as “writing rehab” in order to remove that tendency to judge too early and thus, hopefully, open the floodgates to all those ideas waiting to come out.

The rehab plan is this: write a given amount of music in given amount of time. As I relax I will increase the quantity of music to write and the length of the writing session.

Today, I had set for myself a goal of 2 pages of music in one hour. I ended up with a page and a half so, close enough.

I decided to write whatever came out and not stress out about trying to be new or different or anything like that – this is rehab after all! Must relax and focus on the process.

So I wrote this nice little tonal andante for strings, lying down on the nice futon in my studio, pretty relaxed and singing very, very badly…

Here is a roughly sequenced rendition.

If anyone is interested in my sketches, I could scan those once in a while…

Today I begin engraving Sandro’s piece!

But that doesn’t mean it is finished, because it definitely is not. I have the skeleton of the piece in place, and I just need to fill it out.

Here’s an example.

This shows an idea for a line where I knew how everything else was supposed to go around it, so I didn’t stop to write out all the details, choosing instead to keep on writing the main line.

If I had taken the time to fill out every detail of note, chord, counterpoint, voice-leading etc… then I would have surely lost my flow of ideas.

This is an extreme example, though. Most of the piece is much completely fleshed out than that. Filled out enough that I am ready to begin engraving.

I like to start engraving at this stage because it is really exciting and motivating to see the piece start to take on its final, engraved look.

But I also start engraving now because it breaks up the work a bit: I fill out a page or two of the piece with paper and pencil at the piano, and then move to the computer to engrave them. Then back to the piano and so on.

It keeps it more varied and thus more interesting.

And because it is done digitally, once the piece is engraved I will still be able to make all kinds of changes, additions, deletions and whatever else needs to be done to get this piece as a fit as a fiddle.

Now, I need to start thinking about titles…

The piano piece for Sandro is coming along nicely but slowly, not because of a lack of inspiration but from a lack of time.

There is much to do in setting up the sheet music for sale on my website, a very exciting thing to do and to see it come together, but quite time consuming. The site is coming along nicely, however, and I should soon be done and able to devote my time to composition entirely. Well, almost.

The latest addition to the site is “Uriel’s Anvil” for alto saxophone and piano. The piece has been getting some very positive reviews from people, and I am very happy how the recording turned out. (The performers were Julia Nolan on alto sax and Sandra Joy on piano. They kicked.)

Back to Sandro’s piece.

Before I begin my daily work I usually read through a few pages of Liszt very, very slowly to put myself in that virtuoso mood.

That approach has been working well and I can see my writing getting more virtuoso-like every day. That’s a good thing but it means that the latest pages are better than the earlier ones, which also means I will have to rewrite a lot.

But I am ready for it! Bring on the rewrites!

This is very exciting. I am writing a piece for the great pianist Sandro Russo.

Sandro is a pianist in the tradition of the greats like Horowitz, Cziffra and now Marc-Andre Hamelin. To write for a musician such as him is a great honour.

An honour not without pressure… I have been watching Sandro play on YouTube, as well as other great pianists, and I made the mistake of wondering if my writing I could live up to that.

As a composer it is only natural to have self-doubt in your powers of invention, and it is healthy as long as it leads to growth. But doubt leads to judging your ideas, and judging as you write is death to ideas. That’s the truth.

But I caught myself early and fixed it.

I imagined Sandro walking to the piano, bowing deep as the audience applauded. He sat down, his hands lifted over the keys, hovered for a moment and then…

There it was. I heard music, my music in the hands of a master and I was no longer scared but excited!

Check out Sandro’s videos here.

And here is Sandro’s website.