New Composition Journal

I got a new journal for the holidays. The old one's completely filled up and I can barely understand what I've written half the time.

It's a simple spiral bound thing which allows me to place it on the piano keyboard and open it to a page I want - without having the annoying tendency of pages flipping backwards.

I haven't written anything new in it yet. It's just sitting there...waiting. When I do jot down something, I'll write out my 8 empty bars as usual, then write in the first 2-bars of melody. I haven't found another approach that I like so much. It allows me to very quickly capture a musical idea and memorialize it for future reference. It's rare that I'll "finish" a piece at first sitting. I've done it before, but now it seems that I've got many things going at once.

Some I'll finish. Some I won't. But I do enjoy the whole process of it. Sitting down at the piano. Improvisng. And then something... a melody perhaps, a texture. And then the beginning of a new composition.