Starting and Stopping Composing
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My urge to deconstruct and reconstruct the things I loved doing has been a guiding force. I read comic books, and inevitably wrote my own as soon as I was reading (although I didn't follow through and really develop that skill as an adult). I played board games and made up elaborate new ones on poster board, with no great regret even if they were played only once. (Johnny noted this with perplexity). I played chess and built chess sets out of nuts and bolts.
Sometime in 6th grade I got ahold of a couple of notebooks of six-staff music paper, and started filling them up with notes. Mostly it wasn’t really composing, but more like musical doodling, copying and sketching. There were bits of music theory, medleys of familiar tunes strung together crudely (as was sometimes done in published band scores, perhaps no less crudely in some cases), and two short original melodies with accompaniment. I showed these notebooks to both Mr. Morse and Dr. Kooiker. They both skimmed through them without (as I remember) much comment. I’m not sure whose idea it was to arrange the melodies for band instruments, but I wrote out band parts to one of the original melodies -- one each of flute, clarinet, alto saxophone, trumpet and trombone, and after I showed it to Mr. Morse he generously offered to find players for a quick run-through at the end of a high school band class. I wasn’t there to hear it, and it was awkwardly squeezed in and rushed through at the end of period (of course), so I don't know what it sounded like or what was said about it.
Then Dad ran across an article in the Sunday paper about another Michigan youngster who had written forty-some songs and compositions and she was only seven years old! He actually made a show of being a bit annoyed with me. “Why can’t you do that?” he asked. I bore the discomfort silently, knowing it would be brief and inconsequential. Although not really inconsequential, because despite a few prompts from my sisters, it wasn’t for another year or so that I thought any more of writing music.
More recently I've read that a doodling and sketching phase without producing finished pieces is pretty much par for the course for young composers before they get to really writing.
My urge to deconstruct and reconstruct the things I loved doing has been a guiding force. I read comic books, and inevitably wrote my own as soon as I was reading (although I didn't follow through and really develop that skill as an adult). I played board games and made up elaborate new ones on poster board, with no great regret even if they were played only once. (Johnny noted this with perplexity). I played chess and built chess sets out of nuts and bolts.
Sometime in 6th grade I got ahold of a couple of notebooks of six-staff music paper, and started filling them up with notes. Mostly it wasn’t really composing, but more like musical doodling, copying and sketching. There were bits of music theory, medleys of familiar tunes strung together crudely (as was sometimes done in published band scores, perhaps no less crudely in some cases), and two short original melodies with accompaniment. I showed these notebooks to both Mr. Morse and Dr. Kooiker. They both skimmed through them without (as I remember) much comment. I’m not sure whose idea it was to arrange the melodies for band instruments, but I wrote out band parts to one of the original melodies -- one each of flute, clarinet, alto saxophone, trumpet and trombone, and after I showed it to Mr. Morse he generously offered to find players for a quick run-through at the end of a high school band class. I wasn’t there to hear it, and it was awkwardly squeezed in and rushed through at the end of period (of course), so I don't know what it sounded like or what was said about it.
Then Dad ran across an article in the Sunday paper about another Michigan youngster who had written forty-some songs and compositions and she was only seven years old! He actually made a show of being a bit annoyed with me. “Why can’t you do that?” he asked. I bore the discomfort silently, knowing it would be brief and inconsequential. Although not really inconsequential, because despite a few prompts from my sisters, it wasn’t for another year or so that I thought any more of writing music.
More recently I've read that a doodling and sketching phase without producing finished pieces is pretty much par for the course for young composers before they get to really writing.
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