Yet my aural imagination wasn’t developed enough to generate novel music, except when I was in certain moods or about to fall asleep. And most of what I could hear in my head I found impossible to transcribe.
I can’t speak with certainty about your particular situation, but there’s a decent chance you would find these tasks easier if you had a more powerful theory of music at your disposal. Such things exist, and are known to experts; unfortunately, despite the fact that they have been around for a while now, one is still unlikely to be exposed to them without doing graduate work in music, preferably at an elite university. (The linked blog is one of very few places on the internet where I have ever seen such things discussed.)
But let me stop lamenting and instead try to improve the situation, such as can be done within the confines of a blog comment.
One thing I noticed right away about your compositional process, as you described it, was that it was almost entirely local. As you said, you only composed 2-4 measures at a time. (You did mention recaptiulating things, something which requires a bit of global planning, hence the “almost”.) This is roughly like trying to paint a picture one detail at a time without knowing what it is you’re painting a picture of. Maybe some painters work like this, but I doubt most do. (By the way, this has nothing to do with how abstract the painting is. I suspect that even the most abstract painters have some overall idea of what they want their painting to look like well before they finish it.)
Unfortunately, “traditional” music theory (by which I mean that which the layman can easily find online, or in bookstores, as opposed to what specialists have in their university libraries) does a very poor job of allowing one to think precisely about global phenomena. At its worst, it trains one to ask questions like “what chord should come next?”, which is totally the wrong way to think about music.
In the early 20th century, an Austrian named Heinrich Schenker came up with a theory of the right sort: one that explicitly dealt with musical works on all levels of structure, from the most global and far-reaching down to the minutiae of individual notes. Schenker’s own intellectual context for his achievement was of course quite different from the modern one in which his work is usually placed, but in any event his ideas were picked up and run with by anglophone music theorists, and now “Schenkerian theory” is a standard, literature-rich academic discipline that most readers probably didn’t know about.
This comment is getting too long, so I’ll close with a specific recommendation: musically-inclined LWers will definitely want to take a look at Peter Westergaard’s book An Introduction to Tonal Theory. It’s a favorite at the site I linked to above, and indeed, although it was originally written for college freshmen* I almost think its title could have been: “Music Theory For Smart People Who Care About Occam’s Razor ’n Stuff”.
*While, I hasten to add, Westergaard was teaching at Columbia and Princeton in the 1960s and 70s.
My compositional method was indeed bad for working globally. As a professional level visual artist, I am very familiar with the problem of getting bogged down in the details, which can ruin the global effect of what you are working on.
(By the way, this has nothing to do with how abstract the painting is. I suspect that even the most abstract painters have some overall idea of what they want their painting to look like well before they finish it.)
The realistic style I use for painting is often very abstract. I am not painting faces; I am painting abstract patches of light, shade, and color that happen to look like faces. Here is a video of one of my favorite artists at work in a highly global style; notice how abstract his brush work is, and how it is difficult to tell what he is even painting during the early stages.
I can’t speak with certainty about your particular situation, but there’s a decent chance you would find these tasks easier if you had a more powerful theory of music at your disposal. Such things exist, and are known to experts; unfortunately, despite the fact that they have been around for a while now, one is still unlikely to be exposed to them without doing graduate work in music, preferably at an elite university. (The linked blog is one of very few places on the internet where I have ever seen such things discussed.)
But let me stop lamenting and instead try to improve the situation, such as can be done within the confines of a blog comment.
One thing I noticed right away about your compositional process, as you described it, was that it was almost entirely local. As you said, you only composed 2-4 measures at a time. (You did mention recaptiulating things, something which requires a bit of global planning, hence the “almost”.) This is roughly like trying to paint a picture one detail at a time without knowing what it is you’re painting a picture of. Maybe some painters work like this, but I doubt most do. (By the way, this has nothing to do with how abstract the painting is. I suspect that even the most abstract painters have some overall idea of what they want their painting to look like well before they finish it.)
Unfortunately, “traditional” music theory (by which I mean that which the layman can easily find online, or in bookstores, as opposed to what specialists have in their university libraries) does a very poor job of allowing one to think precisely about global phenomena. At its worst, it trains one to ask questions like “what chord should come next?”, which is totally the wrong way to think about music.
In the early 20th century, an Austrian named Heinrich Schenker came up with a theory of the right sort: one that explicitly dealt with musical works on all levels of structure, from the most global and far-reaching down to the minutiae of individual notes. Schenker’s own intellectual context for his achievement was of course quite different from the modern one in which his work is usually placed, but in any event his ideas were picked up and run with by anglophone music theorists, and now “Schenkerian theory” is a standard, literature-rich academic discipline that most readers probably didn’t know about.
This comment is getting too long, so I’ll close with a specific recommendation: musically-inclined LWers will definitely want to take a look at Peter Westergaard’s book An Introduction to Tonal Theory. It’s a favorite at the site I linked to above, and indeed, although it was originally written for college freshmen* I almost think its title could have been: “Music Theory For Smart People Who Care About Occam’s Razor ’n Stuff”.
*While, I hasten to add, Westergaard was teaching at Columbia and Princeton in the 1960s and 70s.
My compositional method was indeed bad for working globally. As a professional level visual artist, I am very familiar with the problem of getting bogged down in the details, which can ruin the global effect of what you are working on.
The realistic style I use for painting is often very abstract. I am not painting faces; I am painting abstract patches of light, shade, and color that happen to look like faces. Here is a video of one of my favorite artists at work in a highly global style; notice how abstract his brush work is, and how it is difficult to tell what he is even painting during the early stages.
Thanks for the recommendations.