A lesson in ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS

One of my Lichtenbergian Proposed Efforts for this year is to start composing again, and as I’ve mentioned before I’m going to ease into it by writing Ten Little Waltzes for piano. Simple, right?

Hah. A blank page is still a blank page even for simple piano waltzes, and it has taken me until the end of January even to open up Finale and get to work. I have gotten to work, though, and I thought it might be interesting for the readership to watch me put Lichtenbergianism into practice. First up is a string of ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS.

A caveat or two: I am not a trained composer. I am strictly by-the-seat-of-my-pants, wonder-what-comes-next composer. If I had been trained as a composer, I’d have finished those ten waltzes already — as it is, I have just begun my blundering.

This is not an apology — far from it — rather, it is to allow anyone reading this who hangs back from MAKING THE THING THAT IS NOT because they aren’t “professionals” to watch what happens when somebody stops asking permission from the universe to create.

As I say in the book:

You may very well ask how I compose if I’ve never been trained as a composer. That’s my point: no one gave me this knowledge — I stole it. I stole it from textbooks and album covers and choral directors and Mozart. It’s there for the taking. (p. 92)

So, here’s how I work.

I open a file in Finale, the music publishing software that I’ve used since version 1. I immediately save it as “abortive attempts for ten little waltzes”:

Then I just begin futzing around. I may noodle around on the keyboard for ideas — literally just hit some keys and see if anything turns on a light in my head — or I may go to pencil and paper:

The point is that I’m not trying to write a piano waltz. I’m just plopping out random ideas, hoping to trigger more ideas. Most of the ideas will never become waltzes.

How do I know? Here is an ABORTIVE ATTEMPT, #8 for the fifth of the Five Easier Pieces.

Here’s what it sounded like:

Perfectly harmless, but that’s not what I ended up with:

(If you’d like to see the score for that, here you go. Somewhere in the universe are multiple ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS of the final version of “No. 5 (Sonatine”), but you get the point.)

See? ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS keep you from having to torture yourself thinking that you have to produce “No. 5 (Sonatine)” right out of your head, because that’s not the way it works. That’s not the way any of this works. ABORTIVE ATTEMPT —> GESTALT —> SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION: That’s the way it works.

Now that you have that understanding of how I blunder my way through the composition process, here’s my ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS file for Ten Little Waltzes. You will hear some half-assed attempt at a waltz. It will stop abruptly after a couple of measures. You’ll hear a measure or two of silence, followed by the next ABORTIVE ATTEMPT, and so forth. If you’d like to follow along, here’s the score.

And so we begin.