I’m often asked how I know when a piece is done.
The flippant answer of course is that the deadline dictates when the piece is done.
In practice though, it’s a hard question to answer, in part because it’s so personal and in part, for me at least, because the answer keeps changing.
First, there is some truth to the deadline-as-determinant answer, but even that can be more nuanced than it might seem. Sometimes the deadline hits and I hit send and that’s that, the piece is finished. Other times, though, I’m fortunate enough to be able to distinguish between a final draft and a final version of the piece—some of my most successful pieces* had a significant part of the compositional process take place during rehearsals, long after I’d sent off the “final” version. What’s more, sometimes I’ll make revisions after the premiere, or once a piece has been performed multiple times and I have a better sense of what works and what doesn’t. And once that revision door is opened, who’s to say that it ever fully closes again…
The temptation to continue adjusting is always a powerful one. What’s helped me make the decision to stop tinkering is to think of my pieces as diary entries. This can be a pretty concrete connection when the piece is closely associated with a particular memory. For example, I sketched the B section of loss, found the morning after the 2016 presidential election while sitting on the beige couch of our first apartment in DC. When I think about that piece, I tend to think of that moment. Often though, I have only vague memories of the compositional process, and frequently I have no memory of writing the piece. It’s more a case of “it wasn’t there until it was.”
So when I talk about compositions as diary entries, I’m thinking less about connecting them to specific memories and more about allowing the pieces to be imperfect reflections of me, of where I was and who I was at the time I wrote the music. In this sense, it’s about acceptance, about the process of letting go of a piece and sending it out into the world, where it will be what it’s going to be. It’s about giving myself permission to acknowledge the realities that are happening in my life—that I may not have time or bandwidth to take a piece where I want it to be, where it needs to be (but who determines that, exactly?), and making peace with that. It’s understanding that, while a piece of music can always be tweaked, the finishing and the moving on is also an important part of the compositional process.
Unfortunately, it’s pretty common and pretty easy to have a hostile relationship with the past, with our old selves. I think the best thing, though certainly not the easiest, is to attempt to reconcile our current selves with our past selves, howeve that happens and however they manifest. Dave 2020 is a better composer than Dave 2010, but Dave 2010 made Dave 2020 possible.
*And just what is a successful piece, exactly? Who determines this, and how? Is success a fixed quality? And so on…