It's time for some reflection on writing style because I'm having difficulty composing.
Recently I went through my high school music notebook and collected all the pieces of paper littered with drum licks and half-baked cadence ideas. I ended up with a pretty big stack, maybe about 15 scraps of paper. That might seem like a good thing, but the gems were pretty scarce.
If I were to self-diagnose in an attempt to figure out why I jotted down so much crap, I would say that too often I try to compose one measure at a time. And what's worse, is I feel compelled to make every measure awesome and intense. Working this way, I end up with a cadence that lacks cohesion, lacks an underlying theme, where every measure screams for your attention and ultimately the piece feels forced.
Melody is the main thing that I see missing in my older pieces. They need the glue; the underlying theme that ties the music across all sections together in a long-term way. I know I'm preaching to the choir here. You guys all know this. I know this. But it's time that I put the knowledge to good use. A conscious, constant effort must be made to come up with phrases longer than one measure. Then maybe I'll have fewer starts and stops where I struggle to write just one more measure.
Perhaps I should stop looking for inspiration in percussion-only cadences and look to something like jazz instead. I'm not talking about smooth jazz (elevator music), but rather the music of Dizzie Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and Duke Ellington. They create multi-dimensional, driving, cohesive pieces of music. Hopefully that will do me some good.
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