Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?

Three weeks ago, I rather tongue-in-cheekily confessed that I was my own favorite composer. At the time I acknowledged that each and every one of us must inevitably be the best person capable of satisfying his or her own unique set of taste paradigms. But there’s also another extremely important reason to indulge in this sort of seeming bravado: In order to make the effort to create music in the first place and to bring it forward for others to experience, there needs to be a high level of self-confidence. If you can’t convince yourself that something you’ve done is spectacular, how will you ever convince anybody else to care about it?

If you accept such a line of reasoning, there are implications for deeper levels of self-evaluation. On the surface a lot of them might sound terribly evolutionary, but they might nevertheless be worth considering no matter how you feel about progress, musical or otherwise:

Is the piece you’re currently working on or have just finished always the favorite of your own work?

How long does the infatuation for your latest work last? For a day, a month, as soon as you’ve finished it, or as soon as you’ve begun the next project?

Do you even care to listen to works of yours once they’ve become “old”? How long does it take for a piece of yours to become old?

Do you ever listen to recordings of your older pieces?

If the piece only matters to you up to and during the premiere and you honestly have no interest in the further life of your older work, as—believe it or not—some composers have declared to me over the years, why not simply throw away your old scores and recordings rather than allowing them to clutter up your home?

But if you do care about your older work, how do you maintain an active role in getting other people to care about it while at the same time getting yourself excited about writing something new?

Or perhaps all these questions are unnecessary distractions and prevent us from spending time working on our music, old or new.