I spend a great deal of time reading about how past composers get their ideas, and how they approached the day to day grind of writing everyday in hopes it will improve my own habit of staying at the desk. Naturally, it was inevitable that I would spend time with Beethoven at some point in my life – particularly his notebooks and the struggles he went through to attain and shape his material and musical ideas. When you hear a great work by another composer, and not just Beethoven, you naturally assume that it came in perfect form, and all the composer had to do is write it down. Well, it’s not that easy. What you don’t see is what went on between the notes, and the decisions involved…the discards…the revisions, and the countless tedium of finding the thread. Composing is work. Great art is extremely hard work. An eraser is bigger and more powerful than pencil lead and for a composer, and becomes much more important and personal. Sometimes manuscripts can point to clues about a composers compositional and creative process. These notebooks, by Beethoven, presented a glimpse at how he arrived at the questions he asked, his decisions, and more importantly, how he organized his pieces and his time involved in doing so…sometimes spanning many years and many notebooks. The notebooks are masterpieces on their own and inspirational in that they strip the veil and make it seem possible that you too can write as great a work if you ask the right questions about yourself. There are also a number of books and dissertations exploring his creative process that helps in guiding someone through these resources. The only one I would recommend is Beethoven and the Creative Process by Barry Cooper.

Inspired by his example and my research, I started journaling my own ideas years ago; and, it has proved to be one of the most important habits I have as a composer today. I’m not sure if other composers find it as helpful, but for me its proven to be a good record on how I make my decisions, and a place to record future ideas for work, for theoretics, for inspirational quotes and the like. It keeps me grounded. There is a deep personal artistic relationship now between my musical journal and myself….

My journal is more expanded than I believe how other use it or find its purpose. I not only keep musical materials, but also tend to use mine for anything that I think will help me resolve inner conflict and to ask the right questions about music. It’s a personal blog to myself and my craft. No one needs to understand it except me. It’s a record of Research and Development – a lab for success and failure in pursuit of improvement and hopefully (if I am lucky) a personal art. The information in my journal tends to fall into a number of categories and groupings:

• Scratch Work – where I evolve cellular ideas into more general conclusive material.
• Musical Designs – structures, progressions and melodic strands that are abstract conclusions and can be used across many different works.
• Orchestration Ideas – instrument combinations that I hear in works by other composers, read about, or come up on my own.
• Composer and Artist Quotations – interviews and inspirational quotes from other artists through interviews, books, articles, or on my own.
• Musical Aesthetics and Generalizations – simple statements that summate a personal compositional technique, such as “diffused harmony” – both in other composers and my own.
• Personal Aesthetics – a more high level summation of what I am trying to achieve in my writing, drawn from other Generalization and observations about my work to date.
• Drawings – form diagrams, texture and other doodles that may represent structure for a new work.
• Transcription of Research – notes and quotations from dissertations, books, and other publications that I might find useful in understanding how other composers write, use theory, or establish style.
• New Ideas for Pieces – working titles and descriptions of new pieces I would like to create in the future – answering the question “a new piece about ___”.
• Inner Dialog – resolution of artistic conflicts in my past or what I am struggling with at present.
• Scrapbook – clippings and zeroxes of just about anything that I come across that I think may prove useful to me.
• To dos – a laundry list of activities I should be pursuing – ordered or unordered.

And I’m sure you can find a few more useful categories for your own work.

In addition to my main journal, I also keep a field notebook which I use when I am away from home. Similar to the main journal, it serves the same purpose but is more of a scratchpad where ideas can be worked out. This notebook is primarily used for resolving and working out mundane or tedious mechanical tasks, or for capturing mind flow things I can do easily without a piano or extended quiet. The information in here is temporary and is not as neat, which is just as good because writing on the BART train is chaotic on my handwriting. When I get home, any material that is conclusive and useful is transferred to my main journal.

Since I didn’t have a lot of time for composing over the past five years, this has been where I put most of my focus of work. Also, in making a commitment on discarding my old style and changing my own aesthetic and what I wanted to achieve in my work, that commitment influenced my decision on spending less time on writing and more time on Research and Development using a journal.

The danger is that the journal ends up being the end product itself. You make some conclusions in your journal, and that abstraction is enough. There is no need to write a piece if the journal entry is more perfect and a summation of what is in your mind. Working on a piece becomes irrelevant.

However, what has worked for me is finding something very simple and elegant that I can easily use in a practical sense when I do write. These objects, schemas, and templates came out of a haystack of dead ends, confusion, and impractical ideas. These also seemed somewhat alien at first, and it is taking patience and practice in allowing them to become organic to me – allowing them to guide me while not imposing my will. That integration continues for me, but is progressing well. It’s been painful, but I think proving useful in putting me in a new phase of life work. I am asking better questions when I do write.

The journal is a living document, so I don’t expect that today’s usefully applied materials will necessarily be the end all. I can also see a time where a totally different direction where I will want to go, and the journal will take a different curve and head down a different road. Maybe that is a more simplified and less heavy approach since I will ask less questions? Maybe a totally different aesthetically internal style? Maybe I won’t even need one? Who can say?