Idea fixation

What happens to an idea after you’ve thought of it? Do they go anywhere? Do they get better over time if you think about them more? Do they disappear if you stop thinking about them? What if you write them down and forget about them? What does it mean when someone else has the same idea as you?

For various reasons I haven’t been very musically active for the past year and a half. Recently I recalled that I had started working on orchestrating a Sibelius sonatine almost two years ago but couldn’t remember where I had put it. Yesterday I found it and decided to pick up where I had left off. It was an odd experience. I recalled vividly many of the ideas that I had penned. I think this is a good thing because it shows a certain consistency; that is, there were still ideas I agreed with. It would have been frustrating to go back to ideas that I no longer thought were relevant or interesting. I studied this particular sonatine during my last year at MUN, and I still enjoy listening to it. I decided to arrange it for orchestra for two main reasons: 1) studying and playing it lent a certain insight that would have been missing if I hadn’t known it as intimately, and 2) I believed the piece had colours and ideas that could be exploited with an orchestra.

I’ve completed the first draft of the first movement, with minor revisions already to what I had written last year. But as I moved forward I ran into some interesting situations. Yesterday and today I came to the point in arranging where I was working with material that was now repeating in the piece. My dilemma was thus: do I go back and look at what I did for the similar section already and copy it? Is that considered “cheating?” I didn’t want two similar sounding parts being at odds with each other within the same piece, particularly when it is so short. I could try to remember what I had done, or come up with a different take on it. However, I would eventually be entering it into notation software and see what I had already written anyway. Would I lose integrity by “copying” my previous work? Would the music lose its integrity?

In the end I decided in favour of consistency. Even if I had continued on and devised contrasting material for similar sections, I would have seen in them side by side eventually, and most likely one of them would have had to leave. This situation aside, I will still run into consistency problems once I’ve laid all the parts out. After all, it is only a first draft, with two halves being written so far apart. When I started it, I would have had very specific ideas, and I was immersed in that music at the time. I think this is why some of the ideas stood out so strongly for me and I could still hear the sounds I had imagined. My main goal this time around was to get my brain thinking musically again. I found it surprisingly easy to get back into, in terms of productivity. There have been plenty of times when I have attempted to pick up where I left off a piece. Usually I cannot get myself into the mindset of composer; it’s as if I’ve been removed from the piece long enough that I’m just a listener now. I hear the ideas—some of them I like, some of them I know shouldn’t be there. But I’m at a loss for what to do. And sometimes I’ll return to the state I was in when I was last working; I’ll tweak what’s there and then stare at the notes for a while. I wonder what will happen with those ideas.