Thanks for the kind words!

You know, over the years, there has been a lot of material that has wound up on the cutting room floor, stuff that doesn't make it into the deadlined piece on hand but still have some creative fire in them. So, I save all of that stuff into a huge library of binders I keep in my home studio. Now, when I start a new piece, I don't worry about staring at a blank page. If nothing's coming to me, then I can go consult my binders (and over the years, different categories have emerged, such as "good for vocal music" or "When you need the gnarly" or "symphonic ideas"). Sometimes this stuff will just help me to light the match to entirely new ideas, or they are completely transformed to something unrecognizable, but they can still be an essential part of the puzzle.

I also keep in shape... I don't just work on the music that's contracted, but I do the composerly equivalent of shooting a hundred baskets on the court each morning, or scales on an instrument. I might warm up in the morning with one of my favorite exercises, for instance, which is a "transitions" exercise... say, connecting eight bars of music from a Bartok string quartet to eight bars of another composer's music. I'll give myself a few minutes to play around with that. By doing stuff like this, your brain is busting with ideas, "warmed up" for your own work.

By investing creative time like this, you won't be bereft for ideas, from a narrative or musical standpoint. I do improvise, but don't need that skill so much anymore; and I usually can hear everything in my head but sometimes, I'll use NotePerformer (a new tool for me) for some playback from the computer, too.