This week was a surprisingly delightful trip down memory lane through some of my oldest work.
This one’s from October 1999! Aw. I was so very young and optimistic back then hah!
I don’t think it’s technically playable in places. So it’s possibly a piano duet then?
In other news – I think this might have been my voice all along. Or that this piece is definitely in my voice. Child of the 80s, raised on Hollywood’s family films of the time. Their soundtracks’ progressions are fused to my DNA by this point, like some meme-virus lateral genetic transfer. CRISPR-ed into my musical soul.
9/5/22
Revisiting a track I made from the morning pages experiment.
It’s lovely. It’s so me. I feel quite emotional. It’s like coming home. I didn’t expect that when I opened up the project. I thought it’d just be a springboard, a place to start that wasn’t a blank page and wasn’t Constellated (which I still think is viable but that I’m overthinking it. It’s too literal).
Fuck.
The chord progression. I recognise it. I recognise the show my magpie brain has clearly seen the shiny and nicked it! Haha! Still, you can’t copyright a chord progression, so maybe I’ll keep it for later…
Listening back to it, I think I may have been too hasty. It’s not obvious at all.
11/5/22
After the… complex feelings I had about realising a little chunk of the music I was writing on Monday was very familiar, I had a thought. I liked writing for piano, I liked the complex cross-rhythms coming out of mashing several ideas together… I used to write tons of piano music when I was younger, so I’m revisiting it to see if there’s a voice there, before I was ever commissioned to compose.
What did I write then, and was a bit naff? Or is there a kernel of something decent or interesting?
Downloaded a trial version of Finale as in my teens/college/uni days I wrote with Allegro – and whaddaya know, the files open! Woot woot!
… And what a bloody lovely trip down memory lane that enabled.
Some of it is just exercises from uni composition classes, but some of it… some of it is unabashedly my type of thing. I’m such a child of the 80s! Hah. Who knew. Well… me. I’m all flat 6ths and tritones even then, and some lovely syncopated rhythms that wouldn’t be amiss in latin rock pop of the times.
But this is classicalised – no beat, no lyrics, on piano.
And then I’m off all avant garde – way more than I even think of writing now. I think I may have had it trained out of me.
Lots of dense chords. Unexpected progressions. Syncopations.
There are legs here, perhaps. A new avenue.
There are some other really old files in .sng format that I can’t even remember the name of the program I wrote them in. Something from the late 90s.
I think I’m going to accept those old .sng files are gone. Evolution Audio Studio Gold was the program I used, and it was on a 90s PC too. There nowhere to get the files converted. Ah well. I can’t imagine there’s much I’m missing. Farewell, old random tunes!
13/5/22 (Friday the 13th yikes)
Spent the day tweaking and polishing the score and sound on the first movement of a piano sonata I wrote in 2000. So lovely to bring it back to life (see the track and score at the top of the post for the finished work).