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Ramble 26

7 years ago1,164 words

I've composed some new music for the first time in ages - a long piano 'ramble' - so I want to show and talk a bit about that!

I feel like I should probably write about something more... important, since my time here at university is almost over, I've no idea what I'm going to do after this, and it seems like some people got the impression I was dead following my last post... But for now, I just can't be bothered; everything's been so tiring lately that I just want to focus on something entirely unrelated to the demands of the real world for a bit.

I - like many people - can focus better with music that I like playing in the background, and while studying recently, I've been using some of my own compositions for that purpose. Most are years old, though, which is a shame; I've composed so little in the last few years! Just the Taming Dreams soundtrack, an eternity ago, and a handful of things for that Divine Dreams thing I was working on last year.

I miss the days when I'd compose often and for fun, letting the music just pour out without worrying about whether it was 'good' or 'right' and enjoying the pieces that resulted from that because I made them. We tend to like things we've made more than they might objectively deserve; meals you've made yourself taste nicer than the same meal made for you (I imagine; I can't cook), and people probably even enjoy the various odours their own bodies emit despite others finding them disgusting. So much of my old music wasn't 'good' because I didn't know enough music theory to know how to compose 'properly', with harmonic chord progressions and all that (I'm still hardly fluent at any of that), but I liked it - and still do - because it was mine. It reflected what I like in music, which of course is deeply subjective. Plus each composition serves as a portal to memories which, while neutral or even negative when they were formed, are rendered fluffily nostalgic simply because they're temporally distant.

Now, though, I just assume that people will have issues with my work by default. My music is soft and idiosyncratic, different in structure and feel to the types of music that tend to become popular, and that distance from what's familiar makes me assume that other people will perceive it as alien and unappealing - boring, perhaps - for that reason. I'm not properly educated in music theory and I lack musical experience beyond occasional self-absorbed dabblings, so people who know their stuff better than I do might see the probably-glaring technical errors and either dislike it for that reason or suggest ways to make it 'better' by changing things.

I really like this new piece of music I've composed, to the point where I have to resist the urge to listen to it again and again and again. I've been lying in bed before I sleep and just after I wake up, listening to it as a treat, getting chills from how much it moves me. And since it's bringing me such pleasure, naturally I want to share that... but then there's this undercurrent of doubt, of dread that people will dislike or even criticise it, and while it shouldn't matter what other people think, it does; comments on my old music stick in my mind even now, years later. One of my compositions can be ruined for me by negative feedback. A source of pleasure, corrupted.

It's like finding a delicate, glimmering gemstone in a forest, and showing it gleefully to other people, wanting to share its shine, but they just crassly grab it with their muddy hands and slam it into their desk to find out what it's made of, ruining its purity and shattering it into pieces. Or so it feels... I wonder how many other creators feel that way about releasing their personal work into the world?

But on the other hand, my feelings towards my compositions can also be enhanced by other people's enjoyment of them... So is it worth the risk of showing them to other people? I've been wondering that. That I'm posting this shows that I've decided that yes, it is worth the risk.

The thing that I composed is called ∞ Ramble 26 ∞, and that's a link to an mp3 of it.

It's the latest in a series of 'rambles' that I started way back in 2005; 'Ramble 0' was one of the first pieces I ever composed. The last finished one was in February of 2008... so that's quite a gap! Each one is meant to be the musical equivalent of a page of sketches rather than a single, refined, focused piece; a way of just letting music for music's sake pour out without having to tie it to any particular purpose, and with the freedom to follow my whims whenever new ideas came up rather than sticking to any kind of unifying theme or mood. So they're quite long (some are almost 15 minutes), and they jump around between musical ideas which don't really go together very well. Most of them (except for a couple of the earliest ones) are piano 'solos', except they're so polyphonic they'd be impossible for a single person to physically play. No other instruments are used for the same reason a sketchbook page might use only pencil; by omitting colour, more attention can be devoted to quickly and roughly exploring different shapes, different concepts, without worrying about having to flesh any of them out.

I've uploaded most of the other rambles elsewhere in the past, but it might be interesting to go over them in another post here, sometime soon, since there are a lot of similarities and differences between them and this. Skill development, but a consistent mind underlying them all. Perhaps I'll go over some of my other old music too, as I find pleasure in that kind of thing.

For now, I hope that at least someone gets something out of this one... though *I* do, at least, even if nobody else does. And I suppose that's what matters most with this, since the whole reason I composed it was to bring myself a little bit of joy and satisfaction; it's not like I'm trying to sell it or appeal to an audience or anything. It's why the thought of suggested 'improvements' is something I dread, and which would spoil it for me; it's already very successful at its intended purpose (adding light to my life), so I don't want it to start sounding like there's something wrong with it.

There's more I'd want to say about the specifics of this piece and perceptions of and attitudes towards music in general, but I think this is long enough as it is, so I might return to such things some other time.