… but not for the reasons you’d think.

It’s pretty easy putting notes together.  Once you have the general idea of what you want to do done, it’s really just a matter of filling in notes.  In that way, it’s very similar to writing.  Once you know what you’re writing, it’s simply a matter of filling in all the words until you have a finished work.

In fact, it’s scary how similar composition is to writing, the characters are just different.

No, for me, the difficulty in composition is the initial idea.

I have a couple of ideas.  One of them is entirely (as far as I know) unique to the genre.  I’m serious – I’ve never heard of anyone doing a work quite like this before.  That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, but at the very least, it’s extremely rare.  But that’s entirely the problem.

Let’s take concert band as an example.  There are loads of pieces that fit the particular form that concert band pieces usually take.  This is because they’re written for high school bands, etc., and they’re written first and foremost to be educational.  Of course it can be an art form (see “Rhapsody in Blue”, for example) but usually it’s stuff that generally sounds pretty good but follows a fairly predictable form.

If one wants to write within that form, it’s constraining, but makes the task somewhat easier, because not a whole lot of creativity is required.  Once you have the theme, you just write for the form, and out pops a piece.  A somewhat uninteresting one, in some ways, but it doesn’t have to be interesting.  Just sounds good and simple enough for a high school band to play. (I fit pieces like Elliot Del Borgo’s “Prelude and Dance” into this category – I love this piece, but if you look at it objectively, it’s amazingly boring.  Just a bunch of slight variations on a theme in F minor, and not a whole lot more).

I…  kind of didn’t do that with my first piece.  I wrote to a theme, and then wrote somewhat programmatically.  I like what came out, but I think it’s fair to say that what I wrote is far more suited for performance than education.  The only real nod I did towards education was making sure nearly everyone in the band had something to do.

But these new ideas, well, they go even farther astray.  One of the pieces has something that could be performed by a high school but by two different musical “clubs”.  The other one is extremely programmatic and, well, it could work but, I don’t know.

And that’s the tough part.

As a composer relatively new to the “hobby” (hobby isn’t quite the right word but I’m not getting paid for it, so we’ll use it) I feel a lot of (mostly self-inflicted) pressure to write pieces that conform to whatever genre I’m trying to write for.  And, yes, that would be educational for me as well.  It would prove I could do it and probably means I’d crank out more popular pieces.  There’s something to be said for that, I suppose.

But at the end of the day, that’s not what I want to write.  If I try to write that, not only will it be poor copies of what’s already out there, my heart won’t be in it.

So, I won’t.

I’m in the process right now of deciding what my next piece will be.  I have a couple of ideas, as I said.  Either one of these ideas will be interesting.  But is that enough to devote so much time to the process?

Time will tell.