Right after the end of the Spring semester I spent nearly two weeks on the road, visiting Oregon (where Roadtrip Sunrise received a couple of performances) and spending time with family in California.  As soon as I got home I was reviewing sketches that I made last fall for  Some Assembly Required, a new work commissioned by Jacob Harrison for the Iowa State University Symphony Orchestra.

Jacob's new piece

Luckily, I’d sketched out more than I remembered, and the raw materials were pretty much in place.  I’d also had several months to let the piece “bump around in my head” and I was able to resolve some of the formal issues that I’d been struggling with since I started thinking about the piece last year.  For the last three or four weeks I’ve been pouring out music, which happens sometimes, though very infrequently.  Over the last couple of years I’ve bemoaned the fact that being in a graduate program drastically changed my process.  Before grad school, I could write for hours on end…sometimes up to eight or nine hours a day.  Once I came to ASU, I had to carve out little chunks of time here and there between classes, grading, working, and office hours.  My most productive times turned out to be the summers when I had long stretches of free time to let my mind wander (you can’t do much else when it’s 115 degrees outside).  The same is true now.  Without papers to grade or lectures to prepare, I find myself with more than enough time to get on with the work I need to do.

All this has got me thinking a lot about process and craft; two words that are often avoided by composers when they talk about what they do.  Visual artists tend to be more forthcoming about how they produce, but composers still obscure their creativity with Romantic notions of inspiration and mystery (some more than others).  Worse still (IMHO) there are others who don’t think about it at all.  “It’s all very cosmic,” you hear them say.  Still, all composers sit down at a desk, or a piano, or at a computer and develop the ideas that will eventually form a finished piece.  Our process may be exactly the same everytime, or it may change drastically from piece to piece, from year to year; Some Assembly Required began with copious sketches and false starts, but now I find myself working directly on the full score from ideas I wrote down more than six months ago (a way of working that is very different for me).  Still, it feels good, and I like the materials, so why fight it?  Why limit oneself to only one way of working?

This is where I've been working lately

I think part of this sudden productivity has to do with the fact that I’m teaching a private student at Paradise Valley Community College.  One of the things we’ve been working on is process.  Like many composers in their early 20s, my student doesn’t really know yet how to write down everything that comes into his head, nor does he have a set way of working out ideas.  At our lessons, I find myself saying things that I’ve come to take for granted.

• Write down everything.  Just because an idea might not end up in this piece doesn’t mean it won’t be useful down the road.
• Find time to compose everyday.  Eventually skipping a few days will start to hurt and you’ll need the “fix.”
• Work your materials, then rework, then rework again.
• Use up lots of paper and erasers.
• What is your concept?  Do your materials support that concept?
• Create a comfortable place to work, have everything you need at hand.
• If you feel the need to create new materials, don’t.  Go back to your original ideas; if they’re solid, they will yield up new variations of themselves.
• Break your work into manageable chunks.  Sometimes starting at the beginning isn’t the best idea.

In many ways, we’re both taking lessons.  I can sympathize with his challenges because I’ve been there myself and at the same time they’re issues that I continue to address, albeit in an very different way.  It’s good to be mindful of what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and whether there’s a way to improve what you’re doing.

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