My aesthetic approach is driven by gesture and texture, as well as lyrical melody, and combining elements in a way that is analogous with processes found in creative activities such as flower arranging. Selection and placement are key features of my process, in addition to designing gestures, rhythms, melodies and textures.
These days, I never write a piece from start to finish. I usually conceive of and gather together an assortment of gestures which may have been created with a specific piece in mind, or might have been created long before, and stored away for future use.
A note on gesture:
A gesture is a short musical phrase, often resembling what we might call a motif, a seed type of idea which can be used as the basis for a piece. A gesture is a very specific type of sonic utterance, one that has particular characteristics. For my purposes, a musical gesture:
-has a clear beginning, middle and end; a gesture could be a single beat long, or a few bars, but it will feel like a single, delineable event (just like the sweep of a hand, a musical gesture will usually be a short, single and containable event)
-a gesture conveys a strong feeling of energetic directed motion.
-it is suggestive of visual imagery analogous with some sort of energetic flow or action external to the source of the sound (ie the sound makes you think of something extra-musical)
-has a strongly embodied character, in other words, it is analogous with movement that our bodies can make, or it might evoke some other form of energetic motion originating in our surrounding environment (machine-like hammering, pouncing animals, trickling water…)
-takes into consideration the instrument playing the gesture, and more specifically, the movements that a performer makes to play the gesture.
Jane Stanley 