When I'm composing, I find meaning in the act of challenging myself, and/or to make some kind of a puzzle for myself that I have to solve in the music. Oftentimes, I make up rules for myself that I have to follow, like for example when I'm using the knitting pattern for Thordis' fichu as a basis for my compositions (I'll post one of those compositions in the comments - the Finnish Sähkökitarakvartetti playing Hyrnan IV). As you could imagine, this does not make my work simple or easy, or maybe I'm just not clever enough to be able to do this easily in a way that I would be happy with, so - hard mode it is!

When I'm composing with the knitting pattern, I do a lot of experiments and sketches, and then I choose the bits and pieces I like most, and try to make something out of those. It can be really complicated to put the sketches together in a way that makes sense for me. Therefore, while I'm working on the composition, I have to get used to everything sounding terrible before it starts to sound better, and keep chiselling away at the heap of awfulness until something I'm happy with starts emerging.

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Mistakes have the potential make your art more interesting. They might also ruin everything, but sometimes - sometimes they add interest, because without them the piece might be too “slick” or too regular, or too predictable. My last creative prompt was about creating something endless. While I was working on an “endless” idea recently, I made a small mistake in the process. It resulted in making my "endless" melody much much more interesting. This tiny mistake was so delicate and fell into the tapestry of what I was making, so I let it stay there and it created endless new possibilities for my composition.

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For as long as I remember I’ve been fascinated with “endlessness” in art, and in life for that matter. Sometimes things appear to be going somewhere but in reality they are not, or maybe they are but there is no start or end to them. In music, we have things like “Shepard tone” and the “Risset rhythm”. I have played around with ideas that have the potential to be “endless”, for example in my composition “Hikk!” for flute, clarinet and bassoon (see comments for link). There I used a kind of a walking bass melody that walked endlessly, switching between walking up a major third and minor second, jumping up and down octaves where practical. The whole piece is derived from this small idea.

I wonder how you can play with similar ideas in poetry, photography, visual art, dance or other art forms. Feel free to try, and let me know in the comments what you come up with.

One more thing - I would love to get prompts and ideas from you, dear creative people of the internet. Tell me about ideas, interesting books or pieces you think I might enjoy.

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The creative prompt I have for you today is: “Sabotage your own artistic creation to shake things up”. It’s a fantastic way to get out of a rut! A couple of weeks ago, I had been working for hours on end on a composition. I found my results a little bit boring, so I took the whole thing and sped it ruthlessly up and put a quirky beat under the whole thing. The mood of the piece was drastically changed - now it was more weird but also more fun! It was a bit over the top and crazy, but after some adjustments I’m really happy with the results and I’m looking forward to building on top of what I made. Or - tearing it down again, who knows! It’s a process :). P.S. If you want to hear how I “sabotaged” one of my own compositions for fun to make a new piece, check my comments - I’ll put links to pieces where I did exactly this.

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Here is another creative prompt for you, if you're interested: Try creating something using a mistake you made. I do this all the time when I'm composing. For example I might accidentally transpose a section of my piece and it just sounds much better that way. Or for some reason there might be a random sound bite in the wrong spot in my ProTools file that happens to sound very interesting there. Improvisers know that if you play a wrong note you can make it right by emphasising it again somehow. Let me know in the comments if you try to recycle your mistakes, and what you come up with.

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