Where do they keep the good songs?

That was Leonard Cohen's comment: "if I knew where they kept the good songs I would go there more often." Yeah, me too. I'm still struggling with the first movement of my String Quartet No. 2. The last two movements are already written, but the first remains ab ovo (which means in or of the egg, if I recall the Latin correctly). I have gone back to pencil and paper as it offers the least resistance to the putting down of ideas. This morning, over the course of forty or so minutes, I managed to create perhaps seven or eight seconds of music, which tomorrow I might throw away. I am reminded of the comment of an old Hollywood screenwriter who once said: "writing is easy, you just sit there staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood pop out on your forehead."

Where was that bassoon melody that opens the Rite of Spring before Stravinsky wrote it down? Was it in his head somewhere? Or in an old book of Russian folksongs in a somewhat different form? One begins to see why creative people act so strangely or are susceptible to the lures of drink or drugs. Sometimes you just want to shake something loose.

But that's not me. I'm just going to have to keep sitting in front of that blank sheet of paper a lot longer. Sometimes I think I need to plan the work out beforehand, have a harmonic or formal outline. But that never seems to work for me. So I have gone back to my old way of working: just put down whatever occurs to you without thinking about it. Then when you have a bunch of stuff written down, start to try and make sense of it. What would work as basic motif or idea? What would be a nice ornamental idea? Any harmonic implications? You know, that kind of stuff.

Maybe not Beethoven, but Mozart and Haydn had it easy in one sense. They had a whole bunch of styles and ideas laying around. Sure, Haydn was responsible for getting them going, but Mozart, I suspect, simply learned every style there was by imitating it from an early age. Then he made them all MORE PERFECT. Not so easy after all!

Let's listen to the Piano Concerto no 27 in B flat, KV 595 by Mozart: