Creative Angst... Welcome to the club!

Another entry based on a reply I just made to a student journal entry...

Some of you may be finding that you are not content with a composition; you know it could be better, or perhaps you feel it ought to be better, but you're not exactly sure how to achieve this. And meanwhile, there's a deadline fast approaching... Yikes!

We tend to want our music to be not only good, but personal as well. After all, people who hear unfamiliar works by well-known composers can often recognize who wrote them, which suggests that there is something of ourselves — almost like a strand of DNA — in the things we create; or at least this seems to be the case in the hands of most composers, bands, and artists in general.

And so, knowing that what we create is in some way a reflection of who we are, we sometimes find ourselves wishing our compositions were better, but perhaps feeling stymied as to how, exactly, we should go about making them better.

If it is any consolation, this "creative angst" is a normal part of the creative process. I suspect that even professional composers (or, more generally, all people who create things) experience this on a fairly regular basis.

The more you compose, the more developed and sophisticated your compositional skills become, so if this project is one of your first forays into writing music, rest assured that your ability to write the kind of music of which you are capable will grow in leaps (and possibly bounds, too; who knows?) as long as you keep at it.

Regarding your weekly composition projects, I would just encourage you persevere until you're pretty sure that each one is as good as you can make it for now, and then move on to the next piece.

When you start out as a composer your musical taste generally exceeds your compositional abilities (which is the compositional equivalent to the adage about one's reach exceeding one's grasp), so it is nearly impossible to reach a point where you are 100% satisfied with your creations. "I know what good music is," you might think to yourself, "and this [our composition] isn't it!"

Maybe. Or maybe it's better than you realize. But, more importantly, remember that your skills as a performer/music connoisseur weren't developed overnight, and the same is true of your compositional skills. If you keep at it, you will eventually reach the point where you become better able to express what you want through music, and therefore become more content with what you compose. When this course is over, you might even surprise yourself by how good some of the compositions you created are.

And they'll just get better if you persevere.

There is also a beneficial aspect of creative angst: The points in a composition that gave you the most grief in the composition process can become the sections of which you are proudest when your composition is finished. These "angst-ridden" points may turn out to be the most inspired, since greater inspiration is often necessary to work through creative roadblocks. Read more on this in "Running into a Brick Wall," if you like.