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hey guys i set myself a compositional exercise but it was too hard so i didn't do it please don't be one of those "it's all about inspiration" people. the day hasn't yet come that someone can sit down and write a good piece of music without any effort or training. you have to develop a deep understanding of structure, expression, and line, and one of the best ways to do that is to do things that are hard. like make a good piece out of an unpromising fugue subject. you think every single one of bach's fugue subjects is a masterpiece of its kind?

Here is the process: 1. review the works around here. We like it 2. post your complete work here, and wait. 3. always repeat step one.

Well, I believe that, if I'm working on something and I'm not liking the result, it's better to stop than to go on just to achieve one more composition completed, regardless of the satisfaction. As far as I understand art, it's a high matter of taste, and what is an artist who doesn't like his/her own work?

I don't tend to go through and do wholesale rewrites. There are two reasons for this; first that I find it more constructive and less problematic to begin a new work with the knowledge of how to improve upon the methods used in the old, and second because I tend to revise ideas in the course of writing the work anyway. I am fortunate that Sibelius keeps an archive of previous file versions and from these I can see how much I have changed a piece in the course of its creation. Sometimes this is quite drastic; whole sections are moved around, deleted, re-written, but this is part of the inital process and not after the piece is fully formed. Mostly, as others have said, the main purpose of any revisions is to solve any technical difficulties or make minor changes to tempi or interpretation markings. The only major works I can bring to mind that were drastically revised from a workable original are the Violin Concerto and the Fifth Symphony of Sibelius. In the case of the latter, the revisions (adding several important bars to the opening, linking two movements together) arguably elevate the quality of the work and produce a more concentrated argument, but the original versions remain technically accomplished and coherant. This is less so in the case of music such as Vaughan Williams' London Symphony, of which the original version is noticibly inferior to the revised. Pierre Boulez notes that he considers many of his works revisions of earlier ones, even though the length and content may be very different, and that a composition is never truly finished.

hard to vote, I like all... maybe background could be something that includes all references to classical, modern, jazz, pop etc in one.