My dad picked up early on that I was into computers. Or perhaps he decided that I should be into computers and then ensured that that was the case. Either way, it worked well enough for him and he encouraged that. There was the family computer, and I remember us going to Circuit City, god rest its weary soul, to get our very first CD-ROM drive. It was a big deal.
Using the family computer soon graduated to me using my own computer, which then graduated to me using my own computer and managing a small server for the house — one running NT, hosting a webpage, hosting a MUCK — in my little basement bedroom. Falling asleep to the whirring of fans, my desk a hollow-core door on top of four stacks of cinder blocks, the dark wood paneling and smoke-stained yellow né tan carpet. What a sight it must’ve been.
Dad was perpetually afraid — or at least pretended to be so — that I would do something horrifyingly illegal. “I keep expecting the FBI to knock on our door,” he’d say. “They’d ask for you because you were pirating music or learning to build a bomb or something.”
I’m sure I’d deflect. I was pirating music, of course. Gigs and gigs worth. By then, however, I was also downloading sheet music. PDF after PDF of madrigals, chants, anything free (and some things that likely weren’t).
I’d steal the school’s printer to print them out. I’d log in remotely to the student-run Linux server and print them out there so that I could pick them up in the morning.
“I don’t honestly care if you print out whatever you want,” the typing teacher said. He sounded tired and amused, rather than upset in any way. “Other than the fact that it’s my head on the line if the administration caught on to how much paper and ink you’ve been using.”
“Yeah, sorry.”
He just shrugged, and I just gave up on printing any more music out.
At some point, my dad must have caught on, though. It’s not that he was ignorant of my involvement in choir. Of course he wouldn’t be. He came to a few of the concerts, those he could make. But he must have caught onto the depths of my interest and the sheer amount of time I spent engaged with it, as one day he left a box on my desk containing some music notation software. Sibelius, it was called.
Prior to this point, I had found myself with a free copy of NoteWorthy Composer and yet for some reason had never thought much about composing any original music for myself, and yet here I was, starting to write. Something about this, about being handed software from my dad, felt like implicit permission to do so. I don’t know if he intended for such, but that is what I took out of it.
I started with an arrangement or two, and perhaps a few dumb pieces of my own. I say dumb because they were dumb. They were dumb as hell.
I wrote a few pieces for piano that were likely impossible.
I decided that, while I loved requiem masses, they were too sacred, so I tried to write a secular choral piece for the dead.
I was briefly obsessed with chant, while simultaneously being obsessed with Tuvan throat singing, so I wrote a chant that incorporated kargyraa.
I was not good at what I was doing, and I probably thought I was better than I actually was, but I was also learning as best I could. How could I not? I kept trying to be something I wasn’t. I kept trying to be more than I was. How could I not try and outdo who I used to be?