When I was a kid in elementary and middle school, my dad would pay me $20 or so to run off blueprints or print and bind presentation books for him at work and I loved it. *Loved* it. I would prowl through his office supply closet at work and just enjoy all of the different pens and pencils and erasers and notepads that he kept in stock. Binder clips. The comb binder. The giant stapler. The boxes and reams and sheaves of paper. The well-tuned whir of the plotter. Even the rank scent of ammonia from the blueprint machine.
So anyway, one day one of my parents, I forgot which, bought me a pad of staff paper, and by then I was already well into playing the saxophone, and I started 'composing'. It wasn't really that, of course. I was like ten or so. It was mostly writing down embellished versions of my warm-ups and exercises and calling them original compositions. Scales and simple melodies copied from books.
All art may be derivative, but this stretches that definition quite a bit.
And you know, it's weird. I never really did much composing on staff paper. It was one of those things where, as much as I loved the paper and the feeling of using it, I could rarely bring myself to use it for writing music.
Some of it was technical: I did try on several occasions to write on staff paper, but that was too abstract an exercise. I'd wind up writing garbage because I was thinking so much about the intervals that I'd forget about the range, or I'd try to keep the range in mind and forget about the melody. I never really learned to play the piano, either, so that made my life all the more difficult.
Sometimes, I'd just spend all my time thinking about my handwriting and how to be most efficient about getting notes down on paper that I would never actually write any music. We spend a lot of time learning how to write words by hand, and we develop a style over the years, but the same is not true of writing sheet music, and so I spent a few days trying to do just that.
A lot of the time, though, my manuscript paper suffered the same fate as all the countless blank books I have sitting, unused, in my room. It's hard for me to justify marking something in some irrevocable way unless that marking is to be final. A piece of paper is fine. It's whatever. And to that end, my manuscript paper notepads were more likely to see use for homework or notes or whatever. But a book? A book has to be cohesive in some way. I can't use a book of lined or dotted paper for jotting down notes because that's not a cohesive use. And since I can't write long stuff by hand for whatever reason, I wind up getting all these books and never using them.
I must have been a very easy child to shop for because I love paper and pens am content refining my knowledge further and further on them without ever putting them to use.
Never helped me write any, though, music or words.
Sometimes I think that what I really wanted was to be one of those, you know, *artistes* like you see in movies or musicals or whatever. The tortured ones who get into a feverish rush of writing or composing and then tear the page dramatically from the notepad or typewriter and crumple it up and throw it furiously into a wastebasket before pouring another shot of whiskey.
I think a lot of artists secretly want that. They want the ability to have all of the pain of practice and all of the struggle of learning and writing bad shit to be so romantic. They want to experience growth through a montage. They want to be a good writer or composer or instrumentalist without having gone through the process of becoming one.
I wanted that. I wanted to write good music without having to go through the process of learning to write good music.
I think it's visible in a lot of my early work, where I'd have all these grand ideas for pieces that I'd start trying to realize, and then I'd always stall out because I wasn't there yet, and then I'd get frustrated at myself for not being there yet.
Other times, I think that what I wanted was some tangible aspect to an intangible art. There is on some level a sense that intangible art is somehow less real that art you can hold in your hands, that you can touch and feel.
I like books, right? Not just the stories, not just the words, but I like the physical objects. There is something grounding amidst even the most fantastic of stories when you can hold it in your hands. A lot of people talk about that, too. A lot of people say, "Oh, I don't like e-books because I can't hold the story in my hand." They say that even when they're holding an e-book reader in their hands, or a phone. It's physical, but not in the right way.
And I wanted that out of my music. I want that out of my writing. I want to be able to hold it in my hands and know that it's real. That it's a real construction. That it's a made thing.
That I can't get all aspects of writing music longhand right is disappointing. That I can't figure out a consistent style of hand-writing music is disappointing. It means I can't have that tangible aspect that goes along with "real media".
