On composing fragments
You know how routines that used to bring joy begin to feel like a chore? Funny enough, the ragtime project meant to inject more joy into my composing has felt that way lately. I've fallen into the torpor of predictable forms and structures. That's the main impetus for my piano sonatas project, an attempt to push against of some of my second-nature impulses. But how?
One solution is to not finish pieces, to make fragments—to not allow for the normal flow of beginning, middle, end. Stop the piece in the middle, or in the beginning.
Fragments often result from abandonment—as with Bach's unfinished Art of Fugue, who went blind, and then died, leaving the ending all the more epic because unfinished— like Schoenberg, puzzling out how the heck to write for the organ, beginning and quitting two movements of a sonata.
Perhaps we resonate with the human frailty inherent in fragments.
In his poem “Archaic torso of Apollo,” Rilke invests all his poetic powers on the remaining marble torso of a once-complete statue, long ago subjected to dismemberment, left bereft of arms and legs and head. Rilke invests the torso with the qualities of everything that went missing (sight, smile, etc.), a concentration of power in the incomplete frame.
Fragments are evocative of what might have been, of faulty memory, or of long-forgotten past. In the case of Piano Sonata #1, rather than give in to my well-worn impulses, I pulled out my eraser, and... well, you can just make out the erased bits on the scan. Perhaps it's a failure to navigate my way to surprise and transcendence. But perhaps transcendence billows up in the postponements, in the erasures, in the destinations hinted at, in the what-ifs of possible futures.