writing mixed-media non-fiction
A very ally work, without necessarily being part of ally, about my relationship with music and a bit about how music works.
Okay, actually, the two options are as follows: * The multimedia project that’s sort of a fusion between 17776 and ally * A mostly autobiographical story about music and movement (sonata form with those being the a and b themes) * Epistolary as letters or diary entries (historical?) * told straight through with no characters or interaction * Limited characters a la Wolf in White Van
We’re going to go with the latter, so it will become its own project.
I would love to tell you that I hear music in all things.
I would love to tell you, as a composer, that I hear in the thunder timpani, 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.
I would love to tell you that the everyday world is filled with music. 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. It doesn’t though. Its noise, and even when it’s ordered, I don’t feel any sort of savant connection to some deeper source.
I would also love to tell you that the patterns in my dogs’ wet fur or windswept snow 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, but these things aren’t music, they aren’t deeper patterns. They’re just moods.
There is a difference between music and a mood. 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.
Maybe John Corigliano felt that, ‘cause like, that bit in Circus Maximus 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.
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 through me. It was not quite longing, not quite saudade. 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?
You know.
Not music, but a feeling. Music always has feeling, but not always the other way around.
I don’t hear music in the everyday world, but every single bit of music contains within it a mood and
I must have been a very easy child to shop for, because I mostly just loved paper. Paper and pens and rulers. I really loved rulers.
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. 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.
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. Art may all 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. 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.