More utterly wasteful ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS
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Last week I started sharing my first music project in over a year, Ten Little Waltzes for piano. It’s going slowly, to say the least.
Here are some more measures, all pretty lackluster ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS. As before, you will hear a few measures of abortive noodling, followed by a measure or two of rests, and then another Attempt, four in all.
I need to reiterate what I’m doing here, Lichtenbergianism-speaking-wise: These are literally ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS. I write a few measures and then I stop. I make no attempt to turn any of it into something good, much less finished. I skip a measure, put in a double barline, and start a new attempt.
It is worth discussing the approaches I took to blop something down on the page, because each of them is noticeably different and represents a different strategy that I use when composing.
In the first bit, I have gone to my keyboard and played with chords, trying to find interesting progressions and changes. In this strategy, I’m just noodling around on the keyboard and then writing it on score paper. When I have something that is even halfway usable, I transfer it to the Finale® file. The arpeggio accompaniment is there just to provide a beat.
In the second bit, I started with a simple, sappy melody, and then harmonized it with a simple oom-pah-pah accompaniment. It sounds more like a beginning piano exercise than anything real, but one never knows if such a simple melody might develop into something more fearsome.
In the third bit, I went in the opposite direction: heavy chords, bigger sound, more Romantic. Even though it’s only two measures long, this one could be going somewhere. In general, the more promise a phrase has, the less prone I am to teasing out its possibilities in the ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS stage. It’s kind of like how authors will stop writing in the middle of a sentence/paragraph when they know exactly what comes next.
In the last bit, I just noodled out a melody, looking for interesting counter-rhythms to the 1-2-3 beat. I’ll figure out accompaniment later.
And that’s the report from my study. We’re at 5 on the Lyles Scale of Compositional Agony.
By the way, if — after listening to Six Preludes (no fugues) and/or Five Easier Pieces — you might be interested in calling dibs on premiering this work, just let me know. Having an artist to write for is a great inspirational tool.
