For years, I’ve been telling students that they need to be composing daily, and I still believe it, but the reality of my approach to composition over the last couple of years has been something different. I’ve become the person who doesn’t compose for weeks, then sits down and pounds out the draft of something in a few hours, tweaks it over the next few days and calls it finished.
This is not intentional, but for the last few pieces, it seems to have been working–from my Piano Sonata (composed in late 2010) forward, this has been my modus operandi, and it’s produced several strong pieces. It’s as if in some sense I’ve paid my dues, and now the skills are just there, ready when I need them. To try to use them every day might prove counterproductive–the result might be a dilution of the available resources (I’ve always thought of Saint-Saens in this way–he wrote so much music that the really good ideas were spread too thinly for him to be a “great” composer, and he became a merely facile one with a couple of memorable works and a lot of forgotten ones).
This new approach isn’t by choice–having a child under three and a wife who likes to see her husband regularly just isn’t conducive to consistently doing creative work once you throw in the full-time teaching position. But it seems to be working.
I have no desire to continue this way, and I have no illusions that I’ll be able to maintain my “hot hand” indefinitely, but it’s interesting. At some point, I’ll want to get into a better routine, but it’s thrilling right now to carry around ideas for a project in my head for a few weeks, and then pour them out into a new piece.
Tags: Camille Saint-Saens, composition, compositional process, piano sonata