I think that to have a
comprehensive idea from the beginning, before starting composing, it’s what you need. When I need to do something fast, let’s say, a background music for a presentation or for a documentary, I need to have it in time. So there it comes the factor Garyb is talking about “work”. I need to be clear about what I’m going to do.
I find a balance letting myself go wherever my feelings want to go, but, based in a global form already conceived, so I know what I’m composing and can calculate how long it will take. You can’t say “I don’t know” to your client, businessman like people hate this answer, and you unfortunately must give them a tangible answer.
It’s a matter or perception of an “entirety”, rather than a compositional problem to my understanding, what you’re talking about.
In other words:
Let’s imaging you need to plan a travel to India for 6 people including you. You can’t jut
GO to India, cos you have no planned your itinerary yet and this would be a suicidal behaviour, you need to sort out quite exactly how long it will take to cross the border, the possible dangers on the area, you need to change some money to the different currencies of the countries you have to pass through, you need the vaccinations of rigour not to get in trouble, and finally, you need a plan to move into the right place. You can’t afford to get lost, cos it may mean dead!
Well, let’s translate this into composition:
Let’s say you need to compose 6 short songs of 2 minutes each for a theatre performance. You can’t just START composing without knowing what the performance is about, this would be a useless work. You need to know how long it will take you to compose 6 songs amounting to 12 minutes of music, you need to put yourself a dead like day where everything should be finished and mastered, plan the back-up procedures you are going to use in case of disaster, you need to chose the sample library, drum and synth sounds you are going to use for the songs; you need to close your mobile phone, close yourself a little not to get irritated for matters of daily living like discussions, bills to pay, etc., so you are in a good mood which is exceptionally important; and finally, you need a coherent development of the parts of each song, the start, the middle, and the end at least. You can’t afford to get lost into many inconsistent ideas, cos the dead like is coming and you need to present your job.
Well, I think this is something like that… Let’s balance between the freedom of doing whatever you want to, and the form of a little bit of organization, understood to your way.
I don’t have a particular way to get into a composition today, everything, literally, is able to produce the fillings that will bring to imagination the “something” to start. But the organization of it all, is not brought by inspiration, or by anything else, it’s a matter of working on it according to much articulately and even logically with the kind of music you’re building up.
Logics is nothing but what you understand it should be, this is what I mean. Anyway, something is true, a song cannot last forever, it is impossible practically. You can suggest the end of it as what it continues, fading it down, but in the real world, only imagination can do this. Again, I think a mixture of
FREEDOM and
ORGANITATION properly mangled, will give you the perfect solution to what you’re asking for.
Try to get the WHOLE picture before starting, and then… go composing.
I would love to read some outcome of it, whenever you are ready and have found some sort of solution, please, keep writing about it and thank you for sharing this wonderful topic with everybody else.
But am too lazy to actually finish anything.
at all.
