TME Tuesday: Ways to Get Out of a Composing Block

I enjoy composing music. Most of my music is for clinical application, so the songs tend to be simplistic in nature rather than complex or orchestrated. I have lots of repetition, simple sentences, and goal orientations in my pieces, but I still love writing songs.

There are times, though, when I am unable to get my brain going to compose things. This usually leads me into a bit of a spiral and causes more stress than I really need, but one of the good things about being a vintage music therapist is that I know several things will happen:

  • Creative blocks happen. They will end when they end. It is okay to take a break from composing when the ideas seem forced.
  • There are ways to compose things when your brain will not work the way you want it to.
  • Not every song you compose has to be wonderful or even relevant. Sometimes, just getting a song out of you is the way to unblock your creativity.
So, how do I get out of a composing block?

I have several different ways to help me write songs when I am just not feeling it at all. I roll dice or select numbers/keys/meters from a hat. I have a small box of goal foci that I use to develop therapeutic music experiences (TMEs). I have a D&D dice guide that encourages me to develop specific goal-based songs and TMEs. These tools take out the need to make decisions. The decisions are dictated by the dices, and that makes it a bit easier to get myself going.

Improvising is another way that I get myself out of a creative block. I sit down with the guitar or the keyboard and just start to sing nonsense or song ideas. I keep going until a song starts to form. I continue to sing the song until it is memorized. I write it down on a sticky note and then take it to the computer for digitization. After that is finished, I put it into my TME format and note it on the database.

I will dive into my music library to see if there are songs I could piggyback or adapt into sessions with my clients.

I also search my sheet music collection to see what is already out there. I also include my own compositions when I am trying to figure out what comes next. There are times when my songs inspire me to do "next step" extensions. For example, a song about frogs lead me into writing a song about the life cycle of a frog so we could extend the TME into something else.

The most important thing for me to remember in times when songs do not arrive easily is that these times do not last forever.

The music always comes back. 

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