Mini-Post Mini-Series Part 1: My Mini-Musical Crisis

My Mini-Musical Crisis
(...or, what in the world am I doing?!)

It's been a pretty rough two weeks for my string quartet. In the process of attempting a B section for my slow movement, I did something I rarely do: I threw out and permanently deleted two 90-second chunks of music. There's nothing remarkable about this, except that I generally compose very slowly and carefully, meaning I rarely revise, and I almost never discard material. This is largely a result of experimenting with two promising but unfamiliar compositional processes that seem to be at odds with the sort of music I gravitate towards.

To gain some perspective, I've put my composing aside and dedicated this weekend to fun and exploration - musical, of course. I'm listening to as many contemporary (post-1970) quartets as possible before Monday.