zk/diary/2010-04-16-12:08:13.md

%title 2010-04-16 12:08:13 %date The Importance of Processes :blog:fossil:diary:

In my post-recital... ennui?  Freedom?  Afterglow?  Well, anyhow, after my recital, I've found that it's rather difficult to get back into writing music after spending so long away from it simply trying to get the recital up and running with as few hitches as possible (as has already been previously beaten to death here), and even though its been two weeks, I've only written about five bars of music.

Part of the problem has been that I was fairly demoralized after the recital.  After seeing how difficult it was to pull together the performers and get them learning the music as best as possible in even so long a time, I felt that perhaps I was doing something wrong with my music, writing it in such a way as to make it difficult for the performers to learn, read from, or perform.  It was hard for me to go back to writing music that I felt would cause more of the same reactions that I got to my music on my senior recital.

Beyond that, though, I felt that I had lost the sense of process that I had used to write music in the past, a process that served me through several years.  Several of my pieces are based off one process or another.  For example, each of the Character Dances was based off one aspect of a relationship between me and another.  TW was based off the idea of constancy against flightiness.  The left hand of the piano only plays two notes for the entire piece, while the right hand skitters around it indicating a change too quick to handle.

Most composers use some form of process in their music, even back through history.  After all, a form such as sonata-allegro is a form a process, giving the composer a framework in which to write their music.  My processes have been at once more general and more specific than this; more general because the processes I pick do not necessarily dictate the outcome of the piece, and more specific because I'm working at a finer grain of the music: while I may pick a general concept such as transitioning between one tonal area and another as a slow process, taken strictly, this dictates that the piece will take so many bars to play out and that certain clashing tonalities will occur when the changes is in progress.

What I'm missing now isn't necessarily the processes - I've got several lined up to work on in the near future - but the ability to work with musical processes for some reason.  I'm doing fine in programming.  Badger! was the result of coming up with a web app given a certain set of parameters that would limit my programming choices, limit the amount of freedom I had to come up with a product rather than increase it.  Rather than work on a project with an unlimited scope, I limited myself to a certain amount of functionality which led to a more productive development cycle (I'm sure there's a name for this type of development, but I'll be damned if I can remember it right now).

This limiting of freedoms works for me in music as well as programming (though not, of course, politically), and so the strict processes help me get more music done rather than less.  Perhaps what I need to do is just sit down at the computer and keyboard and just write some stupid little songs.  The last time I did that, I wound up having one of the most productive semesters yet.  Maybe part of the problem is that I focused so much on a couple of big projects for so long - Thousand Leaves, the recital, etc. - that it's hard for me to just sit down and write without involving hours or weeks of planning.  Maybe I should take the same approach, though, and reduce the amount of freedoms I have - come up with a process for sitting down and writing music - make myself write for an hour or so a day without distractions.  I have at least one friend who schedules his free time like this, perhaps its time for me to take a cue from him and just sit myself down at the computer, same time every day, and write some music.