A Study in Arrrgh
. . . So I ran to the piano and started banging out notes. Okay, nothing new there . . . but in this case I accompanied this customary activity with wild illegible scratchings on genuine manuscript paper. How times change. I’d been chomping and slashing my way through pads of the stuff till the advent of Finale and then suddenly everything went all tidy and virtual. I still have a fresh manuscript page on the music rack when I’m composing* because sometimes it’s easier to make your experiments on paper, or to save a suddenly orphaned bar or two on paper, or a fabulous and vivid character who obviously belongs in some other story . . . ahem. As I keep saying, writing music is a lot like writing words** in certain ways. And I fished out one of those fragments on paper yesterday, and prepared myself to find out how fast I could write something I could use as an excuse to have my piano lesson today anyway.
The Mozart duet! you’re all shouting***. Yes. Well. One of the things that hasn’t made it onto the blog because it’s too ridiculous, is that the beginning of the week some time while I was out in the garden frantically planting things, I got one of those horrible little splinters† stuck in near the middle joint of my middle right finger. And couldn’t get it out. And the finger swelled up just enough and was just stiff and sore enough that it really messed up my piano playing–not that my piano playing isn’t very easily messed up–for about three days. Never mind, I thought, I can get on with Just a Little Piece for Organ. . . .
My finger finally managed to spit out the rest of the splinter yesterday . . . in time for me not to have time to try to drag the duet back to playable standard because I was instead trying to Write Something Fast, and was already launched onto this project†† . . . and after a brief break for hand-wringing††† I decided my limited time was better spent on the new piece. It’s nothing like finished‡ but at least I wasn’t going in to Oisin this afternoon saying The Dog Ate My Homework.‡‡ It does mean I now have yet one more piece of unfinished music waiting for me to get back to it. At the moment however I chiefly want to get back to Just a Little Piece for Organ, with that third opportunity for mayhem as a pedalboard under your feet. Also because I want to hear something I wrote going BRRRROOOOOONG on a real live organ. I’m so shallow.
Because we had time left over today–during which we should have been playing the duet–I asked Oisin if he wanted to teach me any harmony yet? No, he said, but you’ve been composing long enough now that you might start learning it backwards: you could start keeping track of patterns or chords or key signatures that you like or you keep coming back to.‡‡‡
And then he broke out some Bach as a demonstration of Interesting Things You Can Do with Harmony (and You Don’t Have to Know What They’re Called). I still kind of resist Bach (JS, of course, the Bach) simply because I have an automatic allergic reaction to anyone who is hailed as any kind of Singular Ultimate Genius. It’s my problem with Shakespeare: even if I don’t like him much yes, I can see he’s very remarkable, but he’s not the only truly great writer who has ever lived. He’s not even the only truly great writer in English who has ever lived. He’s just some clever bozo with a vocabulary larger than was good for him who wrote some plays.§ I have a similar feeling about Bach: yes, very remarkable, get a grip please.
But . . . it may just be my supreme naivete about music but . . . I find him astonishing in ways I do not find Shakespeare astonishing. The thing that always re-confounds me when I’m forced to look at some Bach close up, as opposed to letting it wash over me as a pleasant sound from Radio Three, is how modern his use of harmonic progression is: yes, yes, I know, the first lesson in Harmony 101, the class I almost failed back in college. But Oisin’s teaching method of refusing to teach is working a treat with me: I’ve been struggling with these noises and here they are fresh and clean and pure from some provincial geek three hundred years ago. It’s like this direct line from then to now; I respond to his deceptively simple lines and patterns viscerally–in a way I don’t respond to, say, Verdi, whom I’ve loved passionately most of my life–and run home again all fired up to keep composing. There’s a particular brand of greatness here, it seems to me: genius is often way too intimidating. You know that Bach’s music is deceptively ‘simple.’ It still invites you in, and tells you to bring your manuscript paper and your pencil.
Mwa ha ha ha ha ha.
* * *
* Gods, that sounds so pretentious. Is ‘writing music’ any better? Although even as I say that, I’m thinking, why shouldn’t I call it composing? Rant alert. This is perhaps another of those markers of the society we live in, where creativity is suspect, and both elite and elitist, and flourishing one’s endeavours along creative lines is in poor taste, and will get you barred from all the best clubs.^ I would like to stop myself here and say, no, wait, don’t be so cynical, things have improved since I was an unpublished writer who would (almost) rather die than admit what her heart’s semi-secret goal was.^^ But I’m not sure they have. I was listening to a radio programme tonight where a poet was being interviewed. She teaches poetry writing at various schools. I’m probably not getting this quite right, but she said that one of the ways she writes poetry herself as well as teaches it is that you start with a vivid image and let it lead you to the next one. She says that the eleven-year-olds are great: every kid in a class can come up with a vivid image you can write a poem on. By the time they’re thirteen, the real world has caught up with them and divided them into the ‘creative’ ones . . . and the rest. She didn’t pursue this: she didn’t say if it’s still true that even having made it into the ‘creative’ group, you were expected to specialise. If you’re a poet, you’d better not set your own poems to music. If you’re an artist you’d better not write your own stories to illustrate. But Joni Mitchell does it. Maurice Sendak does it. Oh, but they’re successful professionals. Suddenly it’s a whole different criterion: the money gauge. But if you’re an ordinary teenager, if you hang around manifesting too much creativity you’re being self indulgent. The day you’re going to be pitched out into the real world is getting closer and closer and hadn’t you better be acquiring some real-world skills, like–in my young days–typing, and possibly a teaching license?^^^ There are always a few precocious, protean over achievers–the sort of kid who writes his or her own opera: story, libretto, music, designs the costumes, paints the background, directs the beggar, and is written up in the local paper as someone who will go far. Well, jolly for them. The rest of us bumble along at a lower level, worrying about being self indulgent and earning a living. And forty years later I’m a professional living-earning writer who’s worrying about being uppity because she’s started writing music. Feh.
^ Oh good.
^^ I confused the issue for a while by wanting to be a piano accompanist+ . . . .who, all other shortcomings aside for the moment, couldn’t read music. Thus to be young and fat-headed.
+ Doesn’t that sound like someone who accompanies a piano? But I think that’s the right term for someone who plays piano accompaniment.
^^^ Me as a teacher does not bear thinking about. Grendel, Dracula, Mr Hyde, Queen Gedren of Berkubane, Killer Tomatoes, and Robin McKinley as a teacher.
** Which makes the whole specialist thing even dumber
*** in four-part harmony. Or possibly five. One of my sillier ideas–pursuant to a thread on the forum about women with low voices–is to have a fifth line for baritone women. It’s a bit like my ‘you have ten fingers, why shouldn’t you play ten-note chords’ thinking.
† No, not a rose thorn.
†† Title: A Study in Arrrgh. I was also thinking that I may even see my Opus 1 looming: a collection of Strange Little Pieces for Piano. Sort of a stumbling lead-in to Bartok’s Mikrocosmos. In my dreams.
††† Far more easily accomplished in an absence of sore fingers
‡ Given the amount of time it takes me to write even a short story^ I would burst into inconsolable tears of rage and despair if I could finish even a Strange Little Piece for Piano in two days.
^ I mean a story that has stayed a short story
‡‡ I do feel that my finger might have had the courtesy to stay swollen one more day however.
‡‡‡ I like this noise, I said, and played C and Bb. Diminished seventh, said Oisin.
§ And a few poems.
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