It’s been almost two months since I’ve done anything with the Seedlings project but here we are again with Seedling No.5, which I’ve been working on this week. There are a lot of decisions and factors that go into writing music but I thought I’d mention a few process-related things that I found interesting with respect to this piece.
Two of them have to do with resisting common tendencies in music making, the third with trial and error.
There is often a strong tendency to bring a composition full-circle: to end where it began. I resisted that urge in this case. It could also have sounded nice to tie the beginning to the ending in a neat loop but I like how this unfolds. About halfway through things change course a bit and we don’t go back to where we started.
There’s also a tendency sometimes to repeat each section a certain number of times — often two or four — before moving on to the next distinct section of music. You’ll hear plenty of that today but there were also a couple of instances where I decided to resist this tendency and see how things worked out by moving on more quickly from one phrase into the next.
I guess the larger point is that a lot of creativity can happen in resisting what might feel like strong creative impulses. Sometimes in our quest to be creative through invention we forget to look at what’s already been invented and play around with it.
It’s also interesting to me how certain things make their way into a composition seemingly by chance. There are infinite possibilities for where a given piece of music could go through simple experimentation. The way it often works out is that in the course of trial and error I play something and have a mini “eureka” moment because something feels right about what I’ve just played. And yet, I could have just as well had a good feeling about some other thing I came across by noodling around on the keyboard.
Maybe it would be nice to have such a vast command of musical theory and invention that I could envision just exactly what a piece needs and then play it. But it probably wouldn’t be as fun as experimenting and coming across something that sounds right, almost as if by chance.
Hope you’re doing well out there. I’ll see you Friday with something a little different once again.
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