reflecting on my process for music composition

In my pursuit to expressing deeper and deeper truths of myself, I’ve come to appreciate the process behind my art as an artistic expression itself.

Just like the art I am creating, the process of creating art itself is also a unique expression of who I am and a reflection of the path I took to get here.

This sentiment has been simmering in me for a while. Reading The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin helped me to put it into words. It’s a fantastic book that I wholeheartedly recommend to everyone. It’s organized into chapters that each contain Rick’s perspective of various aspects of the artist experience and has proven very inspiring and insightful to me.

Being aware of my own artistic process provides me support for something that thrives from uncertainty, spontaneity and flexibility. Plans are worthless, planning is priceless.

human experience and deliberate practice

I remember coming up with random tunes and small songs when I was a kid. I never seriously considered actually composing music though, until late last year. This is still a very new part of my life. Here’s my current process for musical composition:

The fuel for my expressions consist of two aspects that contribute to my creative output: Deliberate Practice and Experiences.

1. Experiences. When I delved deep into poetry, I realized that I cannot simply sit in a room all day every day and write poetry, publish it, perform it and then come back to my room for writing more poems. I’d lack things to write about after some while, and frankly I would be totally bored.

   I realized that in order to express myself artistically, I needed to live.

   The core of my art is the human experience; living my life to the fullest.

   It’s a huge joy for me to live my life to the fullest, and my artistic drive has a positive effect on my life itself. It motivates me to seek out special experiences, and see every moment clearly.
   
   From mundane moments of preparing coffee or cleaning my room, to exploring breathtaking heights and beautiful scenes in nature, going for wild nights out or having an inspiring conversation in a cafê.
   

   Constantly sharpening my senses and increasing my awareness helps me to experience my life in new dimensions of clarity and depth. Experiencing my life is the core of my art.

2. Deliberate Practice. If my human experience is the core of my art, then deliberate practice spans the universe of expressive possibilities available to me.
   
   The universe that allows me to choose and design the vehicle I ride to express myself, to a space and using a path within that universe, so whatever I express can be experienced by others as well.

   Deliberate practice is about keeping a toolbox ready with a large enough variety of tools that I am proficient in using.

   The vehicle of deliberate practice needs to match my skills and abilities to steer it. I can’t ride a horse if I am not confident in my own ability to walk.

   
   This requires consistency and diligence: deepening the connection to myself, honing my technical skills, improving my fundamental knowledge and exposing myself to the musical expressions of others.

improvisation, recording, transcription, and development

When I express myself both my Experience and Deliberate Practice meet to shape my creative output. Where I let thoughts and feelings flow, where I distill them into music exploring the universe accessible to me.

1. Currently I am very creative when I sit down spontaneously, take my setar into my hand and simply start to play. Then I am being led by my heart and whatever feeling present. I always record my improvisation sessions, usually audio only. I recorded my first video of an improvisation session a while ago, it is available on YouTube.

2. Recording and archiving my creative output is a very important element in my overall process. This is a practice I developed since my first steps as a poet. It helped me to become really prolific in writing poetry. I would often find some of my poems from one or two years ago, continue developing them consistently, and collecting the final poems into poem collections. This practice of collection made it even possible for me to publish poetry books at all!

   
   For music composition, recording is even more important to me, because I am not yet as capable and proficient with sounds as I am with words.

   
   So for example, some recordings of my improvisation sessions contain 10 minutes of material that doesn’t seem to be very fruitful, and one sentence that feels genuinely exciting and amazing to me. The thing is that I often don’t know in the moment which is which.
   
   And on a different day when listening back in a totally different mood, I might resonate very strongly with a sentence I played that at that time I didn’t resonate with at all.
   
   Recording and organizing all my material keeps all options open to my future self.

3. Transcribing my improvisations into music sheet is a very new step in my process. I discovered a great tool for doing so, LilyPond.
   
   It is akin to LaTeX, in that music is compiled into a pdf file based on a text file, where content and representation is seperated. This means that the shape, layout, and any additional elements like notation for fingerings or different techniques can be changed seperately from the actual notes. LilyPond offers a powerful scripting language to do so. [TODO: Insert link to my LilyPond tutorial].
   
   This way of transcribing my music helps me to preserve my music digitally, quickly trying out different variations. The textual representation also allows me to keep track of changes using a version control system (I use git).
   
   Even though transcribing currently takes me about 1h for 1 minute of recording, it unlocks many possibilities that are totally worth the time.
   
   And it’s simply an amazing feeling to see my own music on a professionally and beautifully looking music sheet.

4. After the recording and transcription steps, I enter the development phase. I revisit the raw material I preserved in the previous steps, identify interesting segments and patterns and develop musical pieces from here.
   
   This step is where I currently feel at the edge of my capabilities. I am not yet experienced enough to easily develop a segment I like into a longer piece of music.

All in all, I am very pleased with my current process. I am impressed how diverse and rich of a process I am already able to facilitate, after about 2 years of intense study of the setar.

I feel like a lot of different aspects of myself and my life experiences are coming together and meet in this practice, and it’s a very fulfilling and touching experience.

iterating on my process

There’s times when I need to adjust my process to unlock a path towards my next level as an artist. As I am growing my capabilities and I find new things to express, so too are my needs towards my artistic process shifting and changing.

Holding onto a rigid structure is often more limiting than following what the moment requires. Therefore, I love to improve my process iteratively and organically.

In my experience, the key for each iteration is to let it emerge naturally, and only when it becomes apparent that the current process no longer serves my needs is it time to change it.

I illustrate what I mean with a recent example. When I initially engaged with musical composition, two things became apparent to me:

1. I am receptive to new tunes, new musical ideas are coming easily to me. I really enjoy playing with music as a universal language of expression.

2. I am lacking the fundamentals, vocabulary, technical ability, and tools to actually compose music.

So I set out to dig deep into music theory and obtain knowledge, intuition and technical skills to learn more about the tools I was lacking. This was basically a starting point for me that totally redefined the deliberate practice part of my process.

This is also where guidance from teachers and feedback from fellow students on the path has been invaluable.

Over time, I expanded my proficiency and grasp of deliberate practice, which even unlocked the whole output part of my process: before I had at least a fundamental understanding of all elements I listed in deliberate practice I don’t recall improvising at all, let alone recording new music or transcribing and developing.

Another example is my way of transcribing music. I started out writing music using my own shorthand notations and scribblings in loose pieces of paper. I now have multiple music note books where I can write down music by hand, and I developed my digital workflow using LilyPond as described above.

Both transcription methods are extremely important for me, but the need for them only emerged once I was at that point in my progress.

It’s clear that my process grows with me, and I grow with my process.

closing

In closing I’ll highlight three main points.

1. My artistic process process is fluid and organic. It is constantly shifting and adapting to my changing needs and capabilities as an artist.

2. I remain free in following it, breaking out in parts, or doing something totally else. Being aware of it is what’s crucial.

3. In times of uncertainty and doubt, trusting the process that emerged naturally out of myself is the way.

I encourage every artist to reflect on their own process, how it currently supports them and (if needed), how it can be changed to reach the next level of their artistic expression.

As a creativity coach, I provide personal and professional support to artists and I’m available for new clients. If you are interested, you can contact me for a casual call.

Thanks for reading this article, I really enjoy sharing my learnings and perspectives and I’m excited about what’s to come! Please share this post to help me spreading the word and connecting with more people.