Tim,

Let's see if this summary of your steps in composing Bobsprit's Hornpipe is fairly accurate:

1. The staging and lyrics for this light opera piece determined the structure of the piece.
2. The structure of the piece suggested the chord progressions, which you laid out fairly early.
3. Once you had the chord progressions, you improvised the melody notes to fit the chord progressions and the lyrics.
4. You cobbled together a MIDI recording of the the melody and accompaniment, but the MIDI performance was imperfect.
5. You manually cleaned up the MIDI performance using a MIDI sequencer (you'd probably used Composer to do that today).
6. You orchestrated the parts with different sounds according to whether you were rendering the sound on your Yamaha PSR310 or on your GM sound card.

Is that a pretty good summary? What important steps am I leaving out, or have misordered?

For others reading this post, I think Tim's method of composing illustrates how you can compose satisfying music without necessarily having Mozart's ability to go out into a field of flowers, dream up a symphony, and write it down when you get back to your study. You can incrementally compose music rather than hear it perfectly in your head all at once. (I'd consider selling my soul to the devil for that ability.)

Cheers
-- Mark