I just came across an eye-opener while reading Art and Music, An Introduction (Cleaver & Eddins). While it seems obvious, I didn’t realize how important it is to put yourself in the listener’s shoes while writing:
Loudness, timbre, melody, texture, and tonality all help to create form, but our perception of music form ultimately depents on our memory, since the musical events take place within a time continuum. We compare what we hear at one time with what we hear at another, and we are led to expect certain sound possibilities yet to come, thus, proper timing is the very essence of musical form.
How much of a piece goes by unnoticed or unrecognized just because a person didn’t remember what you wanted them to? From now on, I’m going back over my pieces and making sure that what I want people to remember is actually memorable, or somehow stands out easily from the rest of the piece.