Should You Update Your Old Music?

I’m entering year 12 of my composition career. And here’s the thing: a lot of the music I wrote in those first few years is not quite up to my current standards. I’ve improved a lot - which is definitely what you want. A lot of that early music got one or maybe two performances and they’ve kinda just been collecting dust ever since. Or, maybe it’s a song on an early album that receives exactly 2 streams per year. 

I was recently asked if I have any works for a particular choir voicing - and I did…but it’s one of those old pieces. I’m not exactly sure I want to hand that piece to an ensemble. We probably all have those moments where we look back on our past work and think: “what was I thinking? Violins don’t even have that note”, “these lyrics sound like they were written by a 3rd grader, and what’s with this guitar part?”, “I don’t even remember writing that”, or, “I’m confident the sopranos hate me for that - and they have every right to”. 

That sent me down a rather deep rabbit hole: should I update my old music? Both from a practical and philosophical perspective. Should composers, in general, go back and fix the mistakes of their earlier works? If so, what exactly should they fix? Minor errors? Complete overhauls? All the above? 

Today I want to look at the pros and cons of updating your old works, and I’ll let you know what I concluded about updating my own old works. 

First let’s look at a few benefits of revisiting and revising your old music: 

1. Make an unplayable piece performable. 

Pieces that I wrote back in the day on the free version of Finale lacked any sort of regard for whether real life musicians could play that part. If a piece actually made it into the performer’s hands, they would usually tell me if a passage was awkward - or impossible. But that doesn’t mean that we always end up with a smooth, idiomatic part for all of our players, there’s a difference between “playable” and “comfortable”. Once I had a horn passage that was technically in the correct range, but it was the highest part of the range, and it stayed there for quite some time, and I forgot to include any places for the player to breathe. I think the guy’s lips fell off during one rehearsal. 

If you’ve got a piece that you like but it has some problems like this, revising it could give the piece new life, or at least a longer life. This is especially important for composers that are self-published as you are your own editor 99% of the time - all mistakes in the score are your fault. And honestly, errors are like whack-a-mole - you take care of one of them and five more pop up in its place. 

2. You didn’t have the resources at the time

Maybe you didn’t have the best quality microphone when you recorded it the first time. Maybe your voice has improved. Maybe you’ve gotten better at guitar and so you could record that solo the way you heard it in your head. Maybe you wanted a string quartet, but all you could find was a violin, a clarinet, and a tuba - so you went with that. 

Revisiting an old piece can improve the quality of the piece if there are more resources available to you now. If you’ve been dissatisfied with the way a recording or a piece turned out the first time, and you feel like your artistic vision wasn’t fulfilled, this might be a good option. 

3. Your artistic vision changed. 

Now, this one is perhaps controversial from a philosophical point of view. But if you’re okay with doing a complete overhaul of your work, you might revisit a song because your vision has changed. Maybe you really like the original idea you had, but the execution of it back then is nothing like how you’d do it now. As you grow and evolve as an artist, your creative vision will change, and you can bring your old music in line with your current direction. 

On a similar note, I’ve often been curious what it might sound like if some of my favorite artists took their earliest hits and did a “if I wrote this now” version. What if Toto wrote “Africa” today? What would that sound like? Some music (stylistically) is really the product of the time it was written and might not translate well to current styles, but it might be something worth trying with your old stuff. 

Drawbacks to updating your old music: 

1. It takes time away from new music

With all of these benefits listed above, you do have to consider the price: revising your old music takes time. And if you’re like me, you already find that 24 hours simply is not a long enough day. You’ve got to analyze whether the benefit of revising an old piece outweighs the cost of not working on a new piece. 

2. For some, Philosophically, this is like “rewriting history” 

For a number of composers, they feel like their entire life’s work should effectively serve as their musical auto-biography. In that sense, it would be like “rewriting” your personal history if you change past works, especially if it was just to bring it in line with your current vision. 

And yeah, I kinda see that - if there is a lyric, or a musical moment that came out of a very specific moment in your life - it would change the meaning if you revised the piece. 

3. Your fans might not like it. 

Certain old music has a particular charm. Many people miss the noise that comes from old vinyls on the new digital music. If you’ve got a piece or a song that is well-loved, it might not be received well if you change it. Not that everything you do has to be to make the fans happy, it’s just something to consider.

Furthermore, you may not like it. You might spend all of this time revising, only to find out you like what you did in the first place better. Sometimes it is hard to capture that magic a second time. But also, it might not be fixable. There’s a profound frustration that festers from trying to resuscitate a piece that is already six feet underground. 

So, how much should you revise? 

This takes into consideration all of the pros and cons we just talked about. If you go with a “fix the errors” approach, that won’t take nearly as much time as a complete overhaul. I’d also argue that fixing minor errors doesn’t change your past artistic vision. 

And if you do decide to revise a piece now, is there a point in the future that you’d want to update it again? Maybe that would be a waste of time…or, maybe it would be a cool series throughout your life to just update the same piece every 10 years or something like that. 

Ultimately, it’s up to you. You know your own artistic vision and goals. So, what am I going to do? I’m going to fix enough errors so that all of my previous works are playable, and enjoyable. But, I’ll leave major structural changes in the past. Did I write a low F for a violin? I’ll fix it. Did I incorrectly place syllabic stress in a few places? Those are getting left alone. 

I like the work that I’ve done, and I’d like for those pieces to continue. But I also stand by what I wrote back then, even if it isn’t up to my current standards, or what I would have done if I wrote it today. 

So, what do you think about revisiting and revising your old music? Let me know in the comments!