The importance of showing up in the creative process by Rebecca Hass

4 Mar 2025 · 2 min

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This content was created by The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. This content was uploaded by The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. This is a YouTube video titled "The importance of showing up in the creative process by Rebecca Hass" (created 2025-03-04) containing a solo excerpt of Rebecca Hass reflecting on her compositional practice. She discusses showing up at the piano, composing as a pianist, the value of daily output (quantity leading to quality), allowing imperfect drafts as part of the process, using recurring themes as seeds, and judging work by her own standards rather than external metrics.

Chapters

They taught me first that you just have to show up. You won't do anything if you don't show up. So like getting my butt on the piano bench was more valuable than I realized, cuz I compose at the piano. Um, cuz I'm a pianist, you know, it makes sense. Even if I'm not writing for piano, that's always where I start. And it also taught me that quantity leads to quality, that if you are really focused on only writing the very best thing, that you'll probably hold yourself back from trying things. And so knowing that I just had to show up and do something every day taught me that it didn't matter that much. And it did matter, but it, it was freeing to know it didn't matter that much because if I wrote something bad today, I was just gonna show up tomorrow and then do something else and no one ever had to hear about it again. And. And that was fine. And maybe it was that I would never do anything with it. Maybe it was that it would be a seed of something else. Sometimes I found the same themes coming up in different things that I wrote, and that was kind of cool to kind of tie things together. When I started making that second album, I actually like fused some things together. So yeah, it, it just taught me that you need to show up and do something, and that it's all part of your practice, and you get to practice more the more that you do it, and the more that leads to writing things that are good. And when I say good, I really want to define that as good according to me, the person who is writing it, not good according to some sort of arbitrary standard, like, that's how we should all evaluate our own work. Like, is this good for me, to me? And is this what this piece wants to be?