I write for myself. Then I try to find someone to play it, or record it &/or publish it. That's not easy, but when one does not have a lot of music contacts that's about the only avenue left.

Lately, I sometimes have decided in advanced to compose such standards as a rondo, a sonata form movement, a canzona, a set of variations, etc. However, most of the time I wing it taking after Andrew Imbrie's (1921-2007) approach: "At the start I let the ideas shape themselves as they must; the direction they will pursue and the changes in character they will undergo become increasingly clear as I go on".

 

Write for myself. I feel the world doesn't need any more music of older styles (there are tons of lesser composers of those periods to seek out). In planning sometimes I have some general idea of what I want, sometimes not, and I try to find what setting seems to work best for me. In terms of form, just sort of free style like a toccata.

 

I write for myself. My composing style happens to have a lot of Beethoven influence, but still, I write for myself. As for whether I write in specific forms or just let the melody lead me, I do both really. I have pieces like my Scherzos, Waltzes, and Sonatas where I go for a specific form. And I have pieces like Adagio in E minor, Tears of the Sky, my Requiem for String Quartet, and many more where the melody led me to the rest of the piece.

Even in my form based pieces though, the first theme at least is usually just a melody that I improvised on the piano and then harmonized.

 

I write for myself as well. My aesthetic is influenced by a lot of 20th and 21st century work in the sense that I've studied a variety of works and composers, but trying to pin it down to a single school of thought would be rather difficult. I don't use traditional forms per se, but I definitely plan a formal arc to my work. This happens as I start collecting and shaping material – as I get a clearer sense of the character of the piece and the material that makes up the piece, I also start and get a sense of what kind of formal arc would make sense.

I suppose you could say I start shaping the piece formally, to an extent, as I start figuring out how I want to go about writing it. However, if the shape needs to change along the way, I allow it to change as needed.

 

When I started composing, I didn't have any theoretical knowledge at all. I was just using my musical hearing and my listening experiences. Therefore I was composing with very little structure or musical form. There I mostly glided from one inspiration to another, which was not easy to follow.

Now I still sometimes catch myself using too much inspiration and too little form. But I think I'm slowly improving ;-)

What helps me to maintain a structure are external boundaries. For example, when I did a soundtrack for my slide-show, I had to consider certain timecodes where atmospheric changes were happening in the pictures:

I also wanted to have these changes in the music - that itself provided me automatically with an external structure.

Furthermore, I write for myself (so far) - but also play most of the music myself at small concerts.