One way that I improved as a composer in recent years is that I can take a Musical idea and develop it more fully. I used to come up with ideas that gave me about 30 seconds of music and then I would get stuck and couldn’t go any further. The reason I couldn’t go any further was that I hadn’t thought about musical form and where I wanted to go with my piece. When I started doing more pre-composition, where I took more time to plan out the form and structural aspects of my music, I started finding that I could complete any musical project I started. Another thing I started doing was coming up with complete piano sketches of my work before I started entering it in Finale. Some of my piano sketches are more complete than others. Some of those sketches could be considered complete stand-alone piano pieces. Others sketches consisted only of the melody line and a rough outline of the harmony. When I have my complete piano sketch it’s like having a complete rough draft of an essay or written report.

After the piano sketch is done, I work in Finale until I get the notation how I want it. Then I go through and add phrasing and dynamics. Then I make a pass through and think about if I should vary instrument articulations. This is a good process but it means that I have to make several passes through the score. What I want to do in the future is see if I can conceptualize more of the phrasing, dynamics, articulations, and tempo modifications at the time I am developing the piano sketch.

I consider phrasing, dynamics, articulations, and tempo modifications to be all the Stuff that makes music musical. I need to be clear that it’s not like I ignore the stuff that makes music musical entirely at the time of writing the piano sketch. I often have a lot of the Musical Stuff in mind when I am working at the piano but I opt not to enter them into my Finale notation right away because it can take a lot of time to enter all those things and sometime I end up moving or cutting measures later. Some cutting is inevitable no matter how many passes you make through your score, but conceptualizing the musical stuff at the time of writing your sketch will force you to think more musically from the start.

Perhaps it is still a good idea to wait until you have your notation set how you want it before you enter all the musical stuff and save yourself the frustration of entering all of it and possibly deleting measures. You might find that thinking about the musical stuff in the pre-composition stage may save you time later and you won’t have to make so many passes through your score. The old expression “a stitch in time saves nine” comes to mind. Taking more time at the beginning of a project may save you more time later.