The Agony of Delete

The Agony of Delete

By Colin Holter
Do you blow through pages and pages of music only to toss it out on a regular basis, or does it still burn you to chuck the fruits of your efforts?

Written By

Colin Holter

It’s a truism that composers are sometimes obliged—whether for aesthetic reasons or purely practical ones—to throw away hours, sometimes even days or weeks, of their careful and painstaking work. Every so often I look back on an afternoon’s work and decide it’d just be better to start over tomorrow, always silently grateful that I’m not sacrificing more than a page or two of subpar product; any more than that I might not be able to handle with such equanimity. Recently, however, I got rid of half an hour of music—the product of months of labor—and felt completely fine about it.

The piece in question was a string quartet written about two years ago. It’s never been played—maybe because its original incarnation is 40 minutes long, most of which is noisy, textural soup. I don’t know what prompted me to take a second look at it, but when I pulled up the corresponding file—”Untitled #1,” because it was created with an earlier version of Finale—I knew what had to be done: Everything after the 10-minute introduction simply had to go. I kept the old material for archival purposes, of course, but from now on, the intro is the piece.

I imagine it gets easier to do away with music that isn’t pulling its weight as the piece’s completion gets more and more distant. I’m curious to know how much material my more experienced colleagues can throw away without a twinge, and how often: Older composers, what’s the story? Do you blow through pages and pages of music only to toss it out on a regular basis, or does it still burn you to chuck the fruits of your efforts?