One of the interesting compositional problems I have faced in the past couple of years is deciding on the proper balance between musical creativity based on systematic derivation and that based on intuition. Despite my training in computer science, engineering and mathematics, many of my musical impulses come more naturally through intuition about sounds and their organization. Although I have derived some pieces entirely from a pre-compositional plan, I have felt the need recently to rely more on intuition in composing my music. My latest work, Out of Time for flute doubling on piccolo, clarinet doubling on bass clarinet, violin, 'cello, piano and percussion, was an attempt to construct a piece based almost entirely on intuition in regards to both morphology and the details of interval and pitch choice. I wanted to find out how much music could be generated strictly using this stimulus with little or no planning beforehand. Given that the piece is my longest work to date and that only a modicum of pre-composition was used to generate the piece, I find that this approach can derive much more music than I had previously thought. Although I still struggle to find a proper balance between system and intuition, Out of Time provided an interesting study of what the latter impetus alone can generate.
