At least twice last weekend, I heard Anders Edenroth describe his compositional process as “like a sudoku puzzle.” (He was talking about the puzzle of coordinating bottles and singing in “Water” and later about the loop-pedal writing in their version of “Good Times” and “Catch Up, Ketchup.”
And he’s right – there is definitely an element of puzzle solving in composition. The very nature of instruments with specific limits, tonalities, rhythms, and even notation – all of these are reminiscent of puzzles to solve. It’s little wonder that there has been a long history of composers who puzzle – from Stephen Sondheim all the way back to J.S. Bach, who made up puzzles beyond the ones in his actual music and Mozart, who was notoriously fond of wordplay. I know many composers are also avid solvers of puzzles, too.
I think, too, that this aspect can be cultivated. Often the best compositions come with specific constraints on their creation – limits imposed by the commissioning ensemble, perhaps, but just as often limits specifically imposed by the composer. These limits are parallel to the types of constraints that appear in puzzles – the standard symmetry in crossword puzzles, for example, or puzzles that are intentionally pangrammatic (containing all 26 letters).
Rather than thinking of constraints as something that constrain your creativity, it’s worthwhile to think of them as tools to fuel and guide your creativity. A puzzle with no constraints is uninteresting. And probably the same is true for a composition with no constraints.