Finishing Pieces

Do you start a lot of projects and not finish them? I know I do. I have these ideas that I'm excited about in the moment but then lose interest soon afterwards. Any thoughts?

Currently, I have around one hundred completed pieces (only a handful of which I'd actually admit to but regardless...). I also have approximately 500 incomplete fragments of varying lengths that range anywhere from ten seconds to four-five minutes. I think this may shed some light on my general work ethic.

Yes, it seems as though 80 to 90 percent of the things I start never materialize fully....

Well, I think it depends what you call a "partial piece". If I seriously start composing a piece, I will finish it (well, almost always), even though it may take quite a long time (several months, usually). But I have tons of paper carrying little musical ideas, sketches, chords, rhythms etc. on huge stapels that probably will never find their way into one of my pieces. Or maybe just one percent of them.

After a couple of weeks or months I tend to pick up those staples once more, look through them and sort them into ideas I still like and ideas that now don't seem very interesting anymore and throw the latter ones away. And a bit later, some of the stuff I chose to keep might be thrown away too, and so on. And maybe a tiny fragment of it will actually be used for something.

Got to make room for new stuff.

Do you start a lot of projects and not finish them? I know I do. I have these ideas that I'm excited about in the moment but then lose interest soon afterwards. Any thoughts?

Yup, exactly.

I think it's great practice to sketch stuff out. There's no problem with that. Though, like Gardener, when I seriously sit down to write something (commission or something like that) I finish it and I'm not really slow about it either.

But composing for myself is a lot harder somehow, I simply don't care about "finishing" pieces that often, I just like to sketch and try stuff out. Sometimes I'll finish something by chance or because my idea lend itself to a completed piece. Otherwise, uh. Dunno. Composing should be fun, if I try to force myself to finish every little thing I start I would hate it and not do it anyways.

Scetches? Tons!

Anything I start to finish I do finish. Deadlines, money, etc are what keep me in track. Simple! ^_-

I do have plenty of unfinished works (doesn't everyone?), but when I actually sit down to write I usually either finish a work or set myself a goal: finish this phrase/finish the recapitulation/sketch out the development... etc. This past weekend I worked on the second movement of my latest work, and my goal was simply to finish 24 measures. I finished 29 measures and ended on a good stopping point (end of phrase). I'll work more on it when I have the time and inclination.

Setting realistic goals helps immensely. I don't sit down and say, "I'm going to write a symphony." I say, "I'm going to work on a symphony."

I usually work on mulitple things at once, so from the outside it would appear as though I have lot of "unfinished" pieces. Truly, though, they're all just in different stages of development.

Funny this is brought up... I find it more rewarding to take unfinished snippets of material and develop them. I work with one idea long enough to be tired of it and set it aside when something else comes to mind that I become inspired to work on.

When I sit down to actually write out something from start to finish, I'm generally dissatisfied with it. When I take a couple of ideas I may have come up with 6 months ago and create a piece around it, I find myself liking it a lot more.

I'm a big fan of changing one idea into another. I do it quite a bit, sometimes abruptly and other times more gradually, but it's all about what I hear. Those are the works I'm generally pleased with the most when I'm finished. Whether I'd win any awards on these works is another issue I really don't care about. It's more rewarding to me to complete a work from old ideas than try to force a piece out over a day or weekend.

I have a lot of projects that I haven't even started yet, if that counts :P