First Draft Completed!! Hooray!

The piece stands at just over 17 pages, at four systems per page.

I wrote a total of eight pages today, which is good. It just poured out and I have the form all laid out. It just needs some filling in now, that’s all.

I already know I am excited by some of the ideas I had today, but we’ll see how it all holds up tomorrow.

I have doubts… because the original plan of writing a theme-oriented piece fell by the wayside along the way.

I wound up writing a few development sections, bridges, episodes… Oops.

Oh well.

That’s because the theme itself was more of a, open-ended subject, as it turns out. (Open-ended, as in it didn’t cadence, it just kept on going!)

And because it was a subject, it was asking for an invention-like form. Which is fine with me, you have to listen to your material and follow where it leads.

I am up to page 8 of this piece today. The writing is coming more freely (see previous post), loosening up but still a bit stiff.

One thing I am doing is I don’t stop for details right away. As you see with the picture I just took, sometimes only the melody line and the rhythm got written.

If I had a good idea what the chords were going to be, but not exactly, I didn’t bother fussing over them right away.

That way I didn’t lose track of where the piece was going. If I had stopped there to nit-pick the details, by the time I had been done with that I would have forgotten where the music was going next!

It’s all about the flow.

The other thing I want to mention is that I am aiming for a streamlined sort of form, like “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”. It’s just theme, theme, theme without wallowing in a big development section.

I tend to like writing development sections; it’s like taking my motives out for a spin, see where they lead me. So I have to remind myself to stick to the theme.

It’s not easy because I keep thinking “the theme again? Is this going to be stupid?”

But I think it’s going to work, it’s a pretty chromatic theme anyway, more of a subject than a theme actually, and I don’t actually repeat it verbatim either…

Oh, and I talked to Jeff Richards on Wednesday about producing the video for this piece. He knows a lot about film production, so I am glad he said yes!

Got caught in the paper again. Writing note per note, inching along, before getting a sense of the whole. And I know better too…

But it is only natural to question everything as you write, instead of just letting the music flow without judging it, like a child playing. (Kids hold the key to so many things in life.)

The music is right there…! just bubbling in my mind. All I have to do is let it out.

But as soon as that pencil hits the paper, I start questioning every idea and I lose the spontaneity.

That’s why I call it getting caught in the paper.

The solution is simple; listen to the ideas in my head first, THEN, once it’s worked all worked out, write it down!

It’s much easier to fix something than to come up with it in the first place, because you have perspective.

Like the first draft of a novel or screenplay. There’s always more than one draft.

Or like sculptor first slapping on his clay to get his shape, the stepping back, taking a critical look and then adding a bit here, taking off there, adding the details.

You don’t start with the details.

Here I was, getting ready to write this piano piece. I was reviewing the ideas I had written last week getting ready to pick the best one.

I kept coming back to this one little seed of an idea that was making me smile, urging me to put it out in the sun, give it some water and let it grow.

The problem was it didn’t sound like piano music at all, more like orchestral music.

But I was supposed to be writing piano music!

I should have put this idea aside for later, except that ideas were coming to me fast and furious.

What was I supposed to do? Tell the ideas to wait, hold that thought and come back in a week or so?

So I wrote out the four clefs of a short score and started writing it out and it was fun! I wrote three pages and change in about two hours.

I have no idea why I am writing this piece, if it will ever amount to anything. But I don’t care.

Even as I type this, I can see it on my writing board right now, grinning at me and whispering “come here for second…”

What’s a composer to do?