In a typical live concert, audience members experience a piece of
music as a linear event. There’s no
going back to listen to an earlier spot, no lingering over a particularly
catchy chord. My experience as a
composer is quite different. Over the
course of my career, I’ve perhaps composed two or three pieces in which I sat
down at a piano and wrote the work from one end to the other without stopping. It is far more common for me to work on
multiple sections simultaneously, skipping back and forth throughout the piece as
I work.
This approach works well for me for several reasons. First, it allows for musical ideas that occur
throughout an entire piece to be developed at more or less the same time. I can introduce a brief version of a motive
early in the piece; I can grow it throughout the main body; I can
use it triumphantly at the high point, and then bring it back as a whimper in
the finals notes of the piece. For a work
with a longer duration, I am able to develop multiple movements at once that share
some aspect of a motive. For instance,
in the large-scale oratorio that I’m currently writing, I am finding it useful
to work on ideas for multiple movements of the piece simultaneously. This allows me to devise a few main motives
that will be used in a variety of ways throughout the entire oratorio. This approach is also helpful if I get stuck
on a particular spot – I can jump to another part of the piece and keep
working.
The key to a non-linear approach is staying flexible. I tend to initially work with pencil and
paper and eventually switch over to a computer once my sketches are detailed
enough. With pencil and paper, it is
easy to not get too attached to anything I put down, as the score at this stage
usually looks like a hot mess, with musical ideas scribbled all over the
place. But with a good computer notation program, you can be seduced into thinking you're much closer to a final product than you really are, as the music looks so neatly engraved on the screen and sounds like music
when you hit the playback button. I avoid
the siren call of the computer for as long as I can; when I finally switch over
to notating within Sibelius, I don’t get too committed to any music I put into
the program until much further into the process.
Another key is to think organically. When I write a musical idea that constitutes
the opening of a piece, I try to simplify it. Does the piece really begin four to eight measures earlier than I think
it does? Perhaps even sixteen measures
before my current point of entry? The
same organic approach applies to the climax of a piece. Sometimes I’ve worked on building material
into a high point for so long that I think the section lasts much longer than
it actually does (it is hard to listen with fresh, objective ears). I also find that once I reach a high point, I
can experiment to see if the music can momentarily stabilize and withstand
one more organic push to reach an even higher point than I first imagined. J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter
series, has this approach down extremely well. When she gets to a structural high point of her story, instead of
peaking and letting the tension fall away, she turns the high point into a
plateau to which she adds more material that climbs to yet another high
point.
Sometimes, after working out of order for most of a piece’s
construction, I find it surprising to finally hear it in order at the piece’s
premiere. After a while, my ears adjust,
and then I can’t hear the piece any other way.
