<p>A very <em>ally</em> work, without necessarily being part of <em>ally</em>, about my relationship with music and a bit about how music works.</p>
<hr/>
<p>I would love to tell you that I hear music in all things.</p>
<p>I would love to tell you, as a composer, that I hear in the thunder timpani<qclass="comment">Some thunderstorm audio</q>, in the wind soft flutes, or in the rain a gentle snapping of fingers or rustling of paper; that there is some divine rhythm beneath all things that those gifted by God with talent or who have studied for years are able to hear.</p>
<p>I would love to tell you that the everyday world is filled with music.<qclass="comment">Machine audio</q></p>
<p>I would love to tell you that to hear a car start bears some greater meaning or that the slow ramp up of a flywheel moves me.</p>
<p>I would also love to tell you that the patterns in my dogs’ wet fur<qclass="comment">background image of such</q></p>
<p>or windswept snow<qclass="comment">background image of such on orange fencing</q> that has melted and refrozen is the written form of that same language of angels that shows up in the everyday sounds of the world.</p>
<p>There is a difference between music and a mood, though. Perhaps some composers hear the music in the everyday world, but I was never one of them. Moods, sure. Moods out the wazoo. I gain endless satisfaction on the perfect click of a switch, or a little thrill of excitement on hearing the three-phase converter’s flywheel spinning up.</p>
<p>Maybe John Corigliano felt that, ‘cause like, that bit in <em>Circus Maximus</em> when all the brass and winds come down on this long glissando is supposed to be a siren or something, but all I can hear is the mood that goes along with my husband getting so fucking frustrated at his machines that he turns the converter off and stomps up the stairs and I’m supposed to comfort him but I don’t know how.</p>
<p>The sound of wind coming down over the Flatirons in Boulder made me feel hollowed out — and I know that doesn’t sound like an emotion, but I promise it was — like some sort of pipe in an organ, like the wind was blowing <em>through me</em>. It was not quite longing, not quite <em>saudade</em>. It was like if the unbidden thought of “is astral projection just a wish with very visual imagery?” were a mood. I would see myself, with my arms outstretched, borne away over the valley to the east of the Flatirons, looking down over the quiet and dark highway 93, past the cement factory, until I was set down amidst the wind turbine testing range, because wasn’t that where the wind wanted to go?</p>
<p>I must have been a very easy child to shop for, because I mostly just loved paper. Paper and pends and rulers. I <em>really</em> loved rulers.</p>
<p>When I was a kid in elementary and middle school, my dad would pay be $20 or so to run off blueprints or print and bind presentation books for him and I loved it. <em>Loved</em> 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.</p>
<p>So 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. It was mostly writing down embellished versions of my warm-ups and exercises and calling them original compositions</p>
* Once, I told Dr David "I know that formalism is a bad word, but I like process music" and he laughed and told me not to worry about the soviets, and I was busy thinking about how process music was sorta like inevitability in music form, like the next note could not help but be where it was, and I've always used the word 'evolute' wrong
* Voice training is just manufactured authenticity/emotional labor, and I think I decided that when Sandy asked what part I'd sing if I got back into choir and I said baritone and dropped my voice back down and she told me she had to cut it out of the recording which was understandable, though I don't begrudge girls wanting to be perceived as such.
