Sibelius Light

I ordered Sibelius 7 First. It's due to arrive by courier today.

I couldn't really justify the expense of the full fat version. But I find when I try and write music up neatly - oh the mistakes - and it's just such a pain in the posterior not being able to add the bar you left out. Plus - I have to do it in pencil. Then ink over it. Then rub out the pencil. And then I find the mistake and have to start again. Or I have to do literal cut and paste jobs with scissors and sellotape. Then phtocopy it to cover my tracks. And it just takes forever.

This is exciting. It's almost like I'm taking myself seriously.

Neither Bloody Nor Bowed

This is the song I've been working on this week.

I found a Dorothy Parker poem (Indian Summer) in a book of comic verse which I bought in St Leondards on Sea for 33 p. I was browsing in a charity shop looking for things to read. Three for a pahnd.

This made me remember how much I liked DP's poems. So I looked some more up on the internet.

And what a wealth there are. I like them because they are an antitidote to the lyrics of a lot of jazz/pop songs about love. Yes people in her poems fall in love, yes it's beautiful, and painful when it ends. But they also get over their pain, and move on. Losing love is like falling off a bike. You cycle full pelt into a Ford Mondeo, it hurts like hell, you limp about for 6 months feeling miserable with a leg the colour of an aubergine, but soon you're out there in the sunshine singing praises to the morning again on your two wheeled steed.

A lot of DP's poems were written in what the blurb writers on editions of The Great Gatsby might call the 'jazz age'. It seems fitting to try and set some of them. And they seem to invite it. A little swing.

I identify very strongly with the sentiments of this poem. I am not here, taking compositional baby steps, and blogging about it, because I expect to be a success by anyone elses measure. I'm in this for joy of learning and of creating things. I will not get rich cooking Sunday lunch for my friends - but I will probably have a nice time doing it. And so hopefully will they. Creativity is food for the soul.

So I copied the poems out by hand and stuck them with blu tac to the wall above the piano. To let my mind wander over them and maybe associate them with things I'm practising/ experimenting with.

Less than a day later I ended up spending the whole day experimenting with ideas and coming up with this.

It's 21 bars long. I tried to put more bars in to make it a more standard length - but I didn't like it so much that way. So I'm sticking with 21.

This is either
a) beginners ignorance/incompetence (likely)
or
b) highly appropriate to the content of the poem itself (nice excuse but I'm not buying it unless you are).

I originally wrote it in C - but when I tried to arrange (lazily) by using LH strumming chords. It sounded muddy. So I transposed it to G. Then I decided I wanted to send it to a friend who sings to see what she thinks and took a punt on a key she might be able to sing it in (Eflat).

There are some unresolved chromatic passing notes in there.

But I thought they were nice.....

One Day

Yesterday, when I meant to be practising chromatic passing notes, I ended up spending most of my piano time doing a setting of a Dorothy Parker poem.

This is how composing seems to go for me, so far anyway.

Something springs to mind. A mood. A poem I want to set. A feeling I want to capture. I then spend time. Varying amounts of time. The idea whirls in and out of my head. My subconscious does a little processing the idea.

Then when I'm practising an exercise or experimenting with a technical idea (for example translating a samba reggae rhythm onto the piano) I'll suddenly find something. And my subconscious sticks up its hand and says.

"excuse me, but I like that, it's this idea".

And then I have a beginning. And I ask - what comes next? And I try things. Sometimes what I try is intuitive. Sometimes it's more intellectual - based on the music theory I know. And my subconscious says one of three things about each thing I try.


No.
Nearly. 
Yes.

And I repeat that process (what comes next) until I come to what seems to be the end.

I don't feel like I'm 'hearing' tunes in my head. Not distinctly in an "I can hum this so I'm going to transcribe it" way. It's much more obtuse than that. More saying yes to an instinct of when something I try sounds OK or 'right'. If I can't find what sounds right I have to go away and let it settle. Let my subconscious work it out and suggest things to my intellect to try.

It's a collaborative process.

My subconscious is really bossy and demands the final say.

When the composition mojo visits - go with it. 

Indian Summer in a wet spring.

Sheepishly I am forced to admit that the modest target of 12 pieces in 2012 is turning out to be too ambitious. The process of actually learning to play jazz piano is soaking up time. But with that come new ideas and things to try in my mind.

Ideas are forming and reforming. Swimming up to the surface so that I catch glimpses. Rose moles all in stipple on trout that swim.* But I guess the flies aren't done hatching yet, or whatever, because they're not biting on the end of my line. I see blops and concentric rings where they break the surface by the banks on the other side. I know they're there, I just have to be patient.

I found this Dorothy Parker Poem in a book of comic poems I bought for 33p in St Leondards on Sea in the gap between train arrival and drum rehearsal.

Indian Summer

Then I looked at some other DP poems on the internet and started thinking about how inviting they seemed for setting. Probably swing. Wry and zesty alternatives to the red roses/ deep gloom of so many love songs.

This morning I was practising using chromatic passing notes on C6. Delicious. And I caught a taste of something that made me think about this poem.

Neither Bloody Nor Bowed

And oh now I have currents to explore. 



* Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty.