Musical Seeds
I can’t begin to count the number of musical ideas that have come and gone over the years. Some of them I manage to commit to memory, some actually get written down at some point, and a very select few have actually been turned into pieces of music. The criteria for that selection is usually “what sticks in my head” rather than “this is a worthy component”, which is unfair to a good many that were lost merely because my memory is bad.
I’ll eventually counter this by setting up a good studio or getting good enough at notation that I can do it while I’m at the keyboard instead of trying to deconstruct things later. In the meantime, I tossed a recorder into the mix so I don’t permanently lose this one that I was toying around with this morning:
This is a small musical meditation – but also the germ from which larger music can be constructed and derived. It’s the basic element which inspires connections to other components and themes that eventually gets turned into music – I can sit down with this in my head and play lots of other tangents, weed through them and find those that are cohesive to the feeling to be captured, and then develop that into a song draft. It’s always a very organic process.
Most importantly, it’s a process I haven’t attempted in earnest for several years – glad to see that some of it has matured in the meantime. This piece is best listened to with headphones, and is intended to be soft and subtle in some passages. The timing’s not nailed down yet, but the subdivision of the rhythmic back-bone has a side effect of slowing down the listener’s breathing – it’s a nice mellow tune in that regard.
Enjoy!
