I love contrasts in music. I enjoy challenging myself to mixing very different elements in my own music. Unexpected juxtapositions in art can be so delightful. Why not have some fun with it?!

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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 (if I can call it a "prompt") is: "Give it time - let it marinate and come back to it in a week or two." Or even longer. A year or two? Maybe :)

I love it when I have time to let compositions marinate - that is, to take a break from the work in progress and come back to it later. Sometimes I get too obsessed with some progression that isn't quite working and I feel stuck somehow. Maybe I'm repeating myself and I get so bored of my old clichés. If the deadline isn't very close, I really like to give the piece a rest and work on something else, and then when I open it again later I see everything in a new light. Also - I don’t take the passage as seriously and I’m not as reluctant to make drastic changes. Usually those drastic changes end up being good for the piece, but it's good to keep the old versions just in case. Sometimes I go back to those and integrate something from them into the work again.

The same goes for my older pieces. I love to re-open a piece I wrote years ago and mess around with it again!

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