Sometimes in composing I find myself groping toward a statement that I can call a 'composition.' That is, a collection of sounds organised into an intelligible expression. An intelligible expression is one that, of course, makes sense. In music that sense can be defined by repetitions of a melodic or rhythmic idea along with transformations of that idea in a manner such that the listener can make sense of the logic at play in the composition. "Organised sound" is the simplest definition of music that I know of — it's the organisation of sounds into what we might call music as opposed to random sounds heard on the street. It could be possible to think of the jack hammer and the passing motorcycle as music, but they are not [usually] organised intentionally with one another. And this is a good topic for another day.
For the last two and a half weeks I've been writing a solo piano piece, slowly-creating a variety of ideas, good and bad, some related to one another and some not. This happens at the beginning of a project: ideas mount up, pages of scrawls collect on my table, and out of that mass, forms begin to emerge. One can do a lot of planning if one wants and can know where a "story" is going. Or not. There's no right or wrong way to do this, but it's a mistake for me to think that a piece can be unstructured and satisfying. It's the structure of a piece of music, a painting (figurative or abstract), a building, or a poem that give an artwork a direction that carries the viewer/listener/reader someplace else.
It's important to find your own mode of structure in your work that you yourself will find ultimately satisfying.
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