Confession #2

I'm a composer at heart.

When I was six I started making up my own little melodies on the piano, and these little melodies were half the reason I wanted piano lessons.

Played at the very top of the keyboard, this is the first song I ever composed (with words below):




"Hip, hip, for roses
Quite enough for you
For when I was not married,
I was in love with you."

I was so excited with this song, that I made up more and more songs and melodies as I finally began to take piano lessons and learned how to read and write music. Around the time I was 10, I wrote maybe 30 songs. They were cute little pieces, with titles like "The Woodpecker Song," "I'm Confused," and "Gypsy." I wrote duets, sonatas, theme and variations, whatever I felt like writing. I composed to my heart's content.

But as I learned even more about form in music composition, and my technical abilities became more refined, composing became harder. I was thinking of longer ideas, hearing more than an 8 measure melody with accompaniment, I was hearing three minutes of music with form and direction and a story that meant something. It's hard to coax it all out.

Hard as it was, once in a while, I succeeded. In seventh grade, I wrote "Imagination" and submitted it for Reflections. It was no masterpiece--two chords total, alternating back and forth the entire piece, and pretty simple melody and variations. But it was 3 minutes of music, and by far the most complex piece I'd ever written.

In 8th grade, I came up with several other ideas, one of which actually took shape three years later, during my junior year. I called it "Night," after the book by Elie Wiesel, because to me it tells the story of the holocaust--particulary the mystery of contentions stirring, the fiery train rides to concentration camps, the forsaking of hope, and finally the distant memory of everything since passed.

I've also completed "Take Wing," a happy little tune in F, and "Song for Sharalyn," which I wrote over the summer. "Trapeze" is one I haven't actually written out, but that I have completed. Besides that, I have several other musical ideas that I mess with from time to time. The thing is, with the way I compose, it kinda just has to come to me. I can't sit down and "write something," because I only write what I am pleased to hear. And so, I mess around with ideas and wait as they cook in my musical subconcious, until they're finally ready to emerge and make something out of the silence.

Even so, it is one of my greatest musical desires to be able to freely compose. It is sometimes frustrating having to wait so long to find a good idea and to figure out how to develop it. It is sometimes discouraging to compare myself to other New Age composers like David Lanz and Jon Schimidt and William Joseph who hold these legacies of composing great things at young ages. I wish more than anything to just be able to spit out music like people can spit out words in a fight. I have the ideas--but not the ability to become a vehicle for these ideas to make it into the world.

Which is why I just need to continue to work at it, and it's also why I just decided to take a composition class next semester. :-)