How much do you write that goes in the trash can?

How much of your music ends up being thrown away because you didn't like it?

I just recently threw away a trio I was writing becuase I thought it was trash and I had like, what, 6 minutes of music already written before I realized. I don't throw away stuff often, but when I do it's only because I can't salvage anything from the wreck I'm throwing away.

It's not thrown away, but I have 2 pieces from last year on 4 A3 pages each, that didn't become anything.

I throw music out pretty regularly. Basically it is test writings, to try some ideas, techniques and systems out. When they are written down they are also digested and I can throw the paper out.

I have a lot of sketches that I haven't thrown away, but they could just as well be.

It's important for me that the essence of everything I have written down is stored in my mind, so that when I throw something out it is a detailed specific that is thrown out, not the music.

I don't throw away anything. I don't necessarily use everything I write, but you never know when you'll need to look back at a previous draft or cannibalize an unfinished work, lol. :D

Very little of mine is burned and never seen again to human eyes. However, I do not use a great deal of the material I come up with. I'd say for every 10 ideas, there is one good one that can be developed into a full piece. And with larger works that require more motivic ideas, this ratio is even lower.

Quite a bit, but if I can I try and reuse stuff in other works. Even if I complete something it's usually been through a stage where I had to delete part of it and re-write something different because I wasn't happy. It's rare to completely get rid of anything substantial, because if I've written more than a minute of so it usually means I'm happy enough with it to see the piece to the end.

About 70% goes to the trash, but most of it I don't even write it, are just rejected ideas. From what I do write, I reject about 30%, so is more or less like this, 100% of total ideas, 50% to the trash without being written, 20% written but rejected, only 30% written and used.

I don't know how many measures I've lost to simply deleting it because I didn't think they were good enough..I'm sure it's a ton of notes, though. So lots of throwing away material while writing a piece...but no throwing away whole pieces. I might abandon a work, but since they're all mostly Finale files I don't throw them away, just store them in case I want to refer to them later or finish the piece(I do have some moleskin books and a bunch of random papers with ideas, too, I also store ideas here). I find when I come back to a piece I meant to finish a while ago I do a lot of deleting/editing/arranging to make it better before finishing :P

I've never thrown a single piece of music or idea away intentionally. I have a sketch book with no lines(for jotting down ideas in more of a bubble, free format...less structured than lined paper)....a note book of lined paper....and staff paper in my backpack at all times, even while not at school. I take it with me to church, I take it to work and jot stuff down on break, everywhere. If I've written any actual music throughout the day, I will always input it into finale, just for the sake of hearing it all together, even if my mind's ear has a good idea what it sounds like. Sometimes I hate it, sometimes I love it. I have homework assignments from arranging and orchestration and music theory....8 bars here....duet there, all still on my computer or in a huge(and growing) box of books and papers of ideas. Every year or so, while cleaning and sorting through my computer, to organize my files, I'll go through and listen to a good majority of the saved finale files. I mostly laugh at myself and appreciate how far I've come since then, but occasionally I'll listen to some dinky 30 second file and think "wow, there might be something here" and I'll move it to my desktop so I see it and remind myself to look into it later. Whether to canabalize it, or to expand upon it with a new idea I recently had that fits the same theme. It's an entertaining cycle.

It's rare, but has happened - for me to begin developing something, and to choose to abandon it.

Generally, while the idea percolates, I'm able to home in on something worth exploring.

Great question. Nothing of mine goes in the trash. When I'm writing a piece of music I grow frustrated with it and almost always want to discard the whole thing and start fresh at some point, but I never do. I'd liken my compositional procedure to painting in that once my ideas hit the canvas they are there to stay. I start with a simple sketch that I just keep adding to and touching up until a clear picture emerges (think "Happy Trees"). When I say "sketch" I don't mean that I have the whole piece roughly penciled out. I just know my instrumentation, general length of the work, have some extra-musical guiding idea in mind, and have a basic musical starting point, such as a melody. It's generally a linear process from there and nothing gets wasted. It's when I'm not working on a specific composition that I typically develop compositional methods, melodies, note combinations, etc.... to use as generating ideas for full-fledged compositions. I write down these developments, or record them if I'm playing around on an instrument, and never throw them away. I often run into projects that work well with some idea I have in storage. I also think it's important to finish what I start and move on.

Well, before, most of my stuff ended up down the drain, because I would get an idea, write it, and then not know what to do with it at ALL. Lately, now that I'm working in Juilliard pre-college, I know what to do with my stuff and still not make it boring. I also would get something in my head and sit at the piano, work on it, then I'd do something else, and that's when I would forget things. So now the first priority is to WRITE IT DOWN because SOMETIME I'll be able to use it!

Heckel

like 60 - 75% of what I write either ends of erased, reworked, or thrown away.

I never throw out anything intentionally. I consider myself a "green" composer and am perfectly willing to recycle. You just never know when that snippet you stashed away will come in handy.

I'm not trying to say that my way is the right way and you all suck ;) but: when I've thrown it away - if it doesn't stay in my conscience or I can't evolve it - it might not deserve to be remembered. If it IS good and I've forgotten it, it will probably come up in one form or another, maybe not tomorrow or next year, but sometime. I have too little space around to have piles of junk lying around.

I have a real problem with finishing pieces. One day I love it, the next it's horrible and ends up in the closet, I listen to it again a year later thinking "Yeah, it was goood!" but I never finished it because I've evolved since then. So I don't literally throw things away but I have tons of half-projects and 20 seconds tunes that nobody is allowed to approach.

It happens to lots of composers from time to time but when I say it's a real problem, I mean it's about 80% of my writing. Maybe it's because I'm not good enough yet, but at the same time, how can I progress if I spend my time writing beginnings?

... how can I progress if I spend my time writing beginnings?

Well hopefully you have a lot of practice :)

But more seriously, I feel you. I think everyone has a pile of half-finished works. The best advice is to power through -- follow your pieces to their logical end. Starting small also helps; rarely will a beginner (like myself) finish a large, multipart work. Don't forget that most music is not the 3-hour humongoid symphonies that many are used to with classical music.

You can also post in the "Unfinished" forum around here, though I'd suggest making a possibly worse complete work, and analyzing "what went wrong" afterwards.

I never throw anything out, not even the hand-written manuscripts. Of course, there are some things I never let anyone see but my self, but I rarely compose anything that bad.

Back when I was considerably less experienced, I would probably trash the majority of what I wrote. Well, not "trash" exactly -- I had a folder specifically designated for works I thought were too bad to finish. I never wanted to throw my music away though, because I figured a lot of these "pieces" had elements that were salvageable (possibly even just one phrase or chord). I find nowadays that I practically never do this anymore, which has a lot to do with the fact that I often have deadlines to finish my pieces by, which certainly helps me focus my attention on the compositions I'm working on enough to force myself to work with the ideas I have, even if they don't appeal to me immediately. If you don't like something you wrote, I think it's good to challenge yourself to make it work anyway... who knows, maybe you'll end up writing a much better piece than you imagined?

As for sections of music within a single piece... A LOT ends up in the trash before I consider the piece complete.

I don't have a trash can. I have a folder of ideas, phrases, snippets, etc. which I may or may not choose to develop any further.

While I don't believe that everything I write is going to be used, I never throw anything away. I have notebooks upon notebooks of snippets and bits of themes or chord progressions sitting around. To be honest, I haven't really gone back to look at any of them yet, but I believe I will.

It's kind of funny... the ideas I have written down are in in many notational formats: traditional notation on a grand staff, jazz-like chord charts, plain letter names of the chords, just note heads without rhythms, etc. I do hoard my ideas and I will use some of them one of these days.

I generally won't chuck anything significant but if I'm working on something and there's a part that I really don't think it fits I won't have a problem with deleting it. You have to know when to give something up.