Running Out of Ideas

My composition student said today, “I’m about a minute in and I feel like I’m running out of ideas.”

We went on to discuss how the best pieces aren’t special because the composer never ran out of ideas – they are special because the composer knew how to shape the work with relatively few ideas.

Great works of art, music especially, achieve greatness by manipulating the ideas they start with, not by stringing many good ideas together.

What to do, then, when you feel like you’ve run out of ideas for a piece?

  • Manipulate the ideas you’ve already got. Augmentation, diminution, inversion retroversion.
  • Change other things. Timbre. Orchestration. Texture. Tempo. Harmonic rhythm.
  • Combine two previous ideas. How can you combine two different ideas? By experimenting with them together.
  • Modulate. That’s a big one. An old idea in a new key or a new modality will feel fresh and new.
  • Reconsider what came before. Maybe you need more space between your ideas. Stretch, explore, fill.

If you feel like you’re running out of ideas, maybe it’s your creative muse telling you that you haven’t yet exhausted the ideas you’ve already put down.