When is ABANDONMENT not the end?

This past Saturday I did my How to Do Art Wrong presentation at Southern Arc Dance’s “Signature Saturday,” a day of sessions on movement, sound, energy, and all kinds of hippie woo. It was refreshing, and I met some really cool people.

How to Do Art Wrong was essentially just my Lichtenbergianism seminar, updated with a new intro and tilted towards an audience that is more consciously creative than most. I was worried that it might not be mystical enough for this audience, but when in the session before mine more than half the crowd identified as a personality type that “often leaves projects unfinished,” I knew I was good to go.

Anyway, as I was preparing the slide show and importing slides from previous presentations, I was amused to see this image in the section on ABANDONMENT as one of the examples of work that I had given up on:

This is, of course, the ABORTIVE ATTEMPT for the abandoned choral work SUN TRUE FIRE that I rediscovered last month and subsequently turned into “Azure Stone,” the new violin piece.

It was great, then, that I was able to emphasize how important it is not actually to throw away work you’ve ABANDONED. Some part of it may prove useful some day — as I point out in the book, Broadway composers have done this forever: If a song doesn’t work or has to be cut for time or other reasons, the composer doesn’t throw it in the trash. The composer puts it in a figurative “trunk” and brings it out later for another show. More than a few classic hit tunes were not originally written for the show that made them famous.

So where are your “trunk songs”? How do you file your failures? Do you ever retrieve them?