Another morning build

[handslive]

I haven't had to do one of these in a while. After I came back from vacation in September, J admitted that he felt much more confident about carrying the pager and we're now trading it every two weeks (yay!). This was exactly what I expected to happen, but before I went he was saying he still wouldn't be ready. I just never know with him how these things will work out.

We're the only two people left from the original Edmonton group, too. Everyone else has been laid off or has had their contract terminated. At our peak, when we were doing development work both internally and for external customers, we had something like 15 people although only 6 of those were staff (the rest were contractors). Counting our sister group in Calgary there were 22 of us (with only 2 additional staff members there). So the current arrangement, with just J and I occupying a space that used to hold 11 of us, feels like an odd sort of abandonment. There's enough chatter in the surrounding area that I never quite feel completely alone, but sometimes it's awfully close.

In non-work related happenings (yes, those happen from time to time :-), purplejavatroll was cleaning some things up in the basement and left a pile of notepaper and music paper on the basement stairs, probably intending that one of us should bring it upstairs at some point. I did this, since it was obviously my note and music paper, and sat in front of the piano a couple of nights ago leafing through the pages.

The pages are stiff and slightly wrinkled as though they had been damp at one point and then dried in storage. The scribblings on them are all done in pencil and some of them are smeared or smudged and very hard to read. In any case, I was never a careful scribe. The music itself is hard to read as a result. Some of it I remember vaguely, but have long since forgotten how to play. I realized as I picked away at some of it that this material was 15 years old and largely untouched since that time. It's an interesting snapshot of what I was doing musically at the time.

Stuck away in the bundle is about 16 measures of something else. A short piece, or the beginning of one. My first attempt at writing strictly on paper, using only the principles of musical theory (as I understood them -- I don't know that I've gained any clearer understanding since, but the kind of composition I do now is, hmmm, more formulaic) and my indifferent internal ear. I can clearly remember being unable to play the opening section at the time. It was too challenging for me.

Not so, now, although it will require some work to make it fluid. And the sound. Christ, the sound is not like anything I'm doing now. I'm not sure I'd be able to do now what this piece does. I certainly can't sit at the keyboard and complete it through improvisation and iteration like everything else I've done since. Last night I transcribed it into lilypond and tried adding to it, to at least try to close the last phrase. I wonder again, as I did 15 years ago, if this is beyond me.

And the piece itself brings back such memories. I was working in Swan Hills, an oil town if there ever was one, and living in one of their "bach units" (pronounced as in bachelor). This was a modified double-wide trailer that had a narrow hallway and three separate small apartments. Each unit had a small kitchen just large enough for one person with a half-bathroom and shower (again, just large enough), a table for eating at, a two-person couch and a TV, and a tiny bedroom with a single-person bed. You could cross the whole thing in about 5 strides, taking into account the various obstacles. Each "space" in the unit was marked by either plywood thin walls or a change from carpet to lino.

I was working 10 days and then 4 days off. I had a creaky synth and it took up the space in front of the couch. This was my second summer in the Hills, so I was doing some shift work. On afternoons or graveyards, I'd usually be at home during the day when my neighbours were at work and I could play and sing without disturbing anyone. I hadn't met purplejavatroll yet, so my weekends usually consisted of going home to help around the quarter-section with my dad, an activity I resented.

And how to desribe my feelings about music? You have to understand I suppose that this was my most serious release in school and I was still fairly freshly out of high school. I'd played trumpet in concert and jazz band for about 6 years, taught myself a little piano, written a lot of dreck, was writing more dreck, and had even been in a few musicals in school with fairly major parts. I sang at church. I sang at home. I sang at school. I played piano never less than an hour a night and sometimes three, even if it was just pop music or my own stuff or the easiest classical stuff I could get my hands on (Bach's Prelude in C, Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata (the first movment only), Für Elise).

One might wonder why I ended up in a science stream, computing science in particular, if this was how I spent all my time. And that's hard to describe, too. Other than trumpet, which I was indifferent at, I had no formal training. I had some theory, gleaned from a couple of summer courses at Red Deer College and from my last band instructor (the only thing he was good for, honestly), but I'd have been hard pressed not to pick that up anyway spending as much time at it as I did. My mother taught piano, too, although not to me. She sent my sisters for lessons, too, although not me. I was never resentful of that. I don't know what my enjoyment of the instrument would have been like with formal training. Instead it was like one long discovery, at least until I reached a plateau that I felt (still feel) could not be crossed without training. And this was the point I was reaching when I wrote this piece.

I hadn't done more than stumble into the wall that requires technique to overcome. A short bit in Für Elise that my fingers would regularly trip over. Some modern stuff in 5/4 that my mom had around the house. Things in my head that wouldn't come out of my hands at the keyboard. Teaching myself to write from knowledge first was going to be my way of overcoming my technical failures. I would write the music using my head instead of my hands and this would make it better. I still sat in front of the synth to do this and fidgeted away while scratching at the paper. In some ways, I can see in this piece the beginnings of the style of playing I have now, influenced by some of the pop music I was finding at the time and my, I don't know, internal rhythm.

But I'd forgotten what I was doing with polyphony at the time. Somehow the whole thing feels like a series of unresolved phrases, or only briefly resolved. The harmonies have a tension to them that doesn't quite release. Maybe it's just me. The stuff I write now has almost none of this. When I try to add to this or carry on with some improv at the end, my hands fall into the pop music traps I've taught them and the tension evaporates. How to continue this? Maintain it? I don't know.

Anyway, I've had this melody in my head for a day now and it doesn't leave on it's own. Working title: Lament in D. Because it's in D and I can't think of a better working title. And I can't refer to it to anyone else without a name (I've got stuff with no name because I've never had to discuss it with anyone).

Comments

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

I do love hearing about your creative process.

-J

[minnaleigh.livejournal.com]

I have nothing to contribute to the discussion. I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed reading this and your other posts about your writing.