The Courage to Commit

A few days ago, composer Dan Forrest asked a great question in the American Choral Composers Forum:

These are two great questions:

1. How do you know you’ve found “a really beautiful and worthwhile musical idea”
2. How do balance the “courage to commit to an idea that might be good” vs. “enough awareness” to abandon an idea that “just isn’t great”?

I’d separate out the two parts.

“Beautiful ideas” consist of (1) beautiful (or compelling) sounds (2) made into meaningful ideas.

Compelling Sounds . . .

Finding beautiful or compelling sounds isn’t that hard.

They often come as the result of free play or instinct.

Besides the conventionally beautiful (e.g., major seventh chords, well-placed suspensions, etc.), beautiful sounds elicit an obvious, gut-level reaction.

When you find yourself suddenly enticed by a sound — and when that captivation holds for more than a few days — it’s probably beautiful.

. . . Made into Meaningful Ideas

Though finding beautiful sounds may be easy, developing beautiful sounds into meaningful ideas IS often hard.

By “hard,” I mean “takes a deliberate, sustained, and thoughtful effort.”

Long-term (i.e., years and decades), composers develop a sense for what is meaningful generally through curiosity about life and people and specifically through years of analyzing and performing lots of other music. There is no shortcut for this never-ending work.

Short-term (i.e., weeks and months), composers develop self-compassion for their half-baked ideas through two simple maxims:

1. The full meaning of an idea is *never* clear in the first draft.
2. Inspiration is an ongoing revelation, not a one-and-done event.

Composers who believe and trust these facts experience far less self-doubt.

Instead, they just revise. A lot.

In this revision process, they trust that their long-term understanding will reward their short-term persistence with insight about how to hone the meaningfulness of their beautiful sounds.