Shh! I'm decomposing.

I did some composing today for the first time in about two months. It really felt good.

No, I don't mean writing - I've been doing plenty of that for class (though not enough for this blog, obviously). I mean composing music. I own Sonar Home Studio 6 XL, a software package published by Cakewalk. I have no instrumental talent, so I write MIDI. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, MIDI is a way of coding music. You create the score and then the computer performs it for you using sampled instruments. If you have a good sample library - and the Garritan Pocket Orchestra isn't bad - you can make the music sound pretty convincingly real.

Music is one of my three creative outlets - writing and drawing are the others (okay, drama makes four, but it's not something I can do on my own). In my last post, I wrote about my experience with free-writing. I also talked with Dr. Rickly about it, and she seemed just as surprised as some of my commenters when I voiced my difficulties. It got me thinking about my creative process in general, not just for writing. Maybe looking at how I write music can help me nail down how I write.

Just as with writing, any piece of music must start with an idea - a musical statement. It doesn't have to be complex. Today's musical exercise started with two ascending chords on a harp. That was all. I'd been thinking about music today, but otherwise, I have no idea where they came from. But it was a simple texture, open and wistful. I played the chords over and over in my head until a melody on a flute started to join them. That's when I opened a session in Sonar and began to write.

I can play music in my head, you see. Not just the tune, but the whole arrangement. If I don't have my MP3 player with me, I'll play the Imperial March or "Ana Ng" by They Might Be Giants - anything I'm intimately familiar with. I do it when I'm composing, too - just like I form sentences in my head before writing them. The problem is that the music is very ephemeral. It plays much faster than I can possibly write it down, and much of it gets lost, especially because as I hear what Sonar is playing back to me, it crowds out the musical image in my mind.

A lot of the music I write doesn't get past the first stanza of the melody. Sometimes it doesn't get that far. Maybe the idea wasn't as promising as I thought. Maybe I realize it's too close to something I've heard before. Most often I just can't find another passage to connect to it. Music is not a field of infinite possibility. It is structurally interdependent. The sound must be balanced. The voices can't all be clustered in the same tone range, or it'll sound muddy. If you bring in a secondary melody, it has to somehow echo the first. It's like a huge, multidimensional puzzle, only you have to create all the pieces from scratch. I'm constantly playing out new scenarios in my head, trying it out, erasing it, and starting again. When it comes together, it's exhilarating.

Writing is not infinitely open, either. It, too, must follow a logic and an aesthetic that goes beyond the rules of simple theory. It takes not just a mechanical understanding of the process but an ear for language; while there are many ways I could end this sentence, some solutions just aren't right. Furthermore, what I write two, three, four sentences from now depends a great deal on what I write in this sentence. I am constantly evaluating my options as I write, playing out scenarios and planning ahead like a chess player to try to corner that idea two or three moves in advance.

It's not that I have the whole paper planned from the beginning - far from it. Usually I rush into my paper with a fairly scanty outline, sometimes just with a handful of ideas in mind. It can be nerve-racking, especially when there's a deadline bearing down on me, and I settle more often than I would like for "good enough." But then there are those moments when all the pieces of the puzzle fall in the right places, and I start rocking my task chair in excitement.

I had that sort of moment today when writing my music - that open, solitary texture of the harp and flute was joined by the woodwind section and a few airy strings, and then, with a ferocity that surprised me, the entire string section took over, that dramatic wall-to-wall orchestral sound that you feel vibrating in your sternum. The countermelody transformed the piece. It is no longer just a small, searching melody but a dialogue between the plaintive flute and the soaring strings. Already I have broad ideas for how the piece will continue - another passage of the flute, followed by a dramatic climax and a gradual decrescendo into nothingness.

But I'm in the wrong key now, and I need to figure out how to get back. If you see me staring off into space and conducting with one hand as I walk around campus this week, you'll know what I'm doing.