Archiving, or ABANDONMENT?
/This past weekend I traveled to a comfortable mountain cabin with two of my fellow Lichtenbergians for our annual Retreat.
To recap: We arrive on Thursday, snack and drink and discuss our work for the weekend. Friday, we arise and each goes to work on the project he’s brought. Light lunch, back to work; by mid-afternoon it’s time for the hot tub, supper, and fellowship. Repeat on Saturday, go home on Sunday.
Despite the fact that this year I have multiple projects that need more attention, I decided to take the tub of music manuscripts I found at the back of our storage unit and organize — if not catalog — the flotsam therein.
These manuscripts and notebooks represent sketches and ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS from ages past, some as long as 50 years ago or more. I know at least one of the notebooks was from when I was in high school.
When I cleaned out my study and hid all this material in the storage unit for 20 years, I just dumped everything in there willy-nilly. It was time to deal with that. After all, I don’t want to make it hard on anyone researching my biography, do I?
I claimed the loft bedroom in the cabin because it had the floorspace I needed to set up a table for my laptop and MIDI keyboard, plus the piles of manuscripts.
I had intended to create a database of everything, but then the very first piece of paper I picked up presented archival issues: It had sketches for the 24-Hour Challenges, #2 and #9, but #9 turned into a manuscript for Pieces for Bassoon & String Quartet. My dilemma was — if my goal was to leave behind an organized file of my work — under what should I file it? More basically, what kind of system did I need to develop so that someone could find that piece of paper whether they were looking for the 24-Hour Challenges or the bassoon quintet? The curse of Librarian Brain.
I dithered on that quandary for most of Friday morning, but finally decided to ABANDON that for the time being as a roadblock. I ended up sorting the manuscripts into their actual titles, and you will not be amazed to hear that I have more than a few unfinished projects:
Symphony No. 1 in G major for orchestra: I have only the third movement (a concert waltz) and the opening of the fourth movement.
Symphony No. 1 in c minor for band: The first movement was premiered by the East Coweta High School Concert Band back in the 90s. I sketched out a second movement, but no more.
Symphony in f minor: An oldie, ancient even, that I never got beyond a stab at the opening theme
A Day in the Moonlight: This is a play by Mike Funt, a Marx Bros. version of Rostand’s The Romancers; he wanted songs to go with it. I got two songs completed, at least two others sketched out, and a list of the songs we needed.
Seven Dreams of Falling: The opera based on C. Scott Wilkerson’s play of the same name. I got Dream One completed, and Scott seemed to like what I had done with his libretto, but then he had to focus on his PhD and we never got back to it. (I see from his Facebook page that he’s gone on to write more libretti, probably for more gifted (and faster working) composers.)
Actually not that much music, although most of my recent stuff is now computerized and nowhere to be found in manuscript.
I’d like to complete the G major symphony and maybe the c minor band piece. I wouldn’t mind completing Moonlight since it has the best chance of being performed. And I would really love to finish Seven Dreams if Scott could find the time to give me more words.
The hard part of the sorting process was what to do about the two dozen spiral-bound music notebooks in the tub.
First pass was to cull the blank notebooks. Second pass was to label notebooks with the sketches, manuscripts, and ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS contained therein.
Third pass was to mark musical ideas that had never seen the light of day, followed by transcribing those ideas into Finale so that I would have the ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS at my fingertips and not at the bottom of a tub of papers.
Those fragments I have saved to a folder named FLOTSAM, and the files have names like riddle song and yearning, heartwarming. Some are more specific, like the three songs from a putative musical about a community theatre: “It was so good,” “Auditions are tomorrow,” etc. (Is there a theatre version of the roman à clef?)
There were one or two surprises. One of those was a trio for two flutes and clarinet that I know I must have written in high school, i.e., the early 1970s:
This was so long ago that I was hand-drawing my notes. In my defense, this manuscript would have been the actual score — it was so long ago that I had no means of actually printing music, and I would have wanted the musicians to be able to read their part without squinting.
Here’s what it sounds like: mp3
I was astonished that it sounded as cromulent as it did. Remember that when I wrote this, I had no compositional training at all — and still don’t. I was a flute player (first chair, thank you) in band, but no one ever offered to teach me how to write music. I’ve been flapping about for over 50 years now. Oh well, maybe next time.
The other flotsam I’d like to share is a theme I scribbled down around the same period. It struck me as an exceptionally pretty coda to a symphonic work, but I’ve never used it. Maybe I’ll stick it into the c minor band piece.
Be advised, this is a raw ABORTIVE ATTEMPT and I did nothing to clean it up or fix it. You’ll just have to imagine it under lights. (Yes, that was a Fantasticks reference.)
Soaring, symphonic coda: mp3
And then there was this piece:
You see what I mean about my manuscript handwriting…
I have no memory of this piece. Apparently it’s called Sampler, and what text I can decipher sounds like a cross-stitched platitude with lines like “we hasten to the dead” and “sun revolves the day.” I figure I’ll spend some time next transcribing this piece and trying to reconstruct what the hell it was supposed to be. There are two and a half pages of manuscript, but I truly do not remember working on it; I certainly didn’t finish it, at least not in Finale.
Something to look forward to…
