Well it's good to read that things are mulching nicely in other brains. Sadly, I seem to be stuck, as I often am early on in a new piece, with trying to find a technical 'fit' with some quite unruly musical material. The material is fairly 'free', in the sense that it feels as if it lies outside the constraints of (in this case) metre or pitch consistency. Which is fine, except that it isn't really free in that way (or wasn't created that way) and part of what I need to do is find structural contexts in which its seeming freedom is exposed as being false. If that makes sense! My problem is 'how'. Which isn't to say I don't have any idea 'how', just that appropriate 'hows' are proving hard to come by.

Being stuck - and/or at least uncertain as to how or even whether to proceed - is by no means an unfamiliar feeling. A good many years ago I wrote a piano sonata for the recently deceased and much missed Yonty Solomon that came together with such ease I began to feel as though it was composing me rather than the other way around - a 17-minute piece in about half that many days - and I thought afterwards "why has this never happened before?" (and it's not happened since, either). I'm currently wrestling with a piano quintet whose first movement was composed in 1980-81 and which has remained in cold storage between then and relatively recently, as I was unconvinced about the need for the remaining three movements. It's well under way now, but working at it from the present perspective while trying to ensure that it won't end up sounding as though the long gap in creativity is obvious doesn't make the task any simpler...

I find that it very much depends on the project, and I can't really predict it much in advance right now.

I've just knocked up a patch in Max/MSP that is going to be fantastic for generating raw material for my new electroacoustic piece, but I've realised in the course of generating it, that it's going to need to be recorded (probably into ProTools) and then mixed with other materials (generated by the same patch) in order to make an interesting and rather uncomfortable experience... 

I wonder if you could elaborate on this? I am having the same problem, though in my case it's a difference of 3 years and not 28. I feel very keenly my 'growing pains' as a composer when faced with even such a recent unfinished effort.

[discarded]

I don't think that necessarily needs to be the case. What I'm saying is that coming back to a piece of work after a long hiatus can be seen in terms of the difficulty of thinking oneself back into the original situation, or in terms of the opportunities which might emerge from treating the preexistent elements as if they were someone else's. This doesn't necessarily need to be "reflected" explicitly in the result.

Almost everything I write involves a "germination" period measured in years, during which the composition gradually "comes together" in a literal way - from an accumulation of imagined details and moments on the one hand and from a slowly differentiating overall shape on the other. So it's very difficult to say "how long" anything takes. Even in the case of free improvisation, it could be said that one's entire musical life, and development, and indeed "growing pains", are part of the composition process whose audible part takes place in the time of the performance. One thing I very seldom do is start at what will end up as the beginning of a piece and work through to the end. The detailed working-out of the orchestral piece I've just "started" has begun with a proportion- and tempo-scheme for the entire thing, which seems to me the only "natural" way to go about it, to create a framework which will accommodate not just "what I hear" but also unforeseen extrapolations and discoveries.

Returning to the point, in 2005 when I was taking a year off working on any new scores, I had the opportunity to complete a piece which had originally been performed incomplete in 1990 (and of which there also existed a previous unperformed version from 1987, based on first sketches from 1984). This involved physically rewriting the score and making more or less radical "corrections" along the way, and composing 3 minutes or so of entirely new music in the middle of the piece, for which I used some material from the 1987 version. What happens is that several times the music takes turnings into entirely unexpected soundworlds, which in 1987/1990 somehow wouldn't have been feasible, and though these turnings are certainly very perceptible to a listener they don't necessarily come across as "time travel" I think. You'd know there are some fundamental disjunctures in the music but you wouldn't necessarily ascribe them to different stages in the "history of its genesis", or at least I wouldn't if I didn't already know.

With the best will in the world, I'd have to admit that I'd have great difficulty in elaborating on this and, accordingly, I am much indebted to Richard Barrett who has (above) said much of what needs to be said about this kind of thing with infinitely more eloquence than I could hope to muster. All that I could perhaps add is that such "growing pains" may perhaps be with us always, regardless of the amount of development that each of may have under our belt...

Over the years I've got precomp down to the size of a doily. Shrinkage. You know it makes sense.