Even now, I still have resistance to integrating my music-writing and literary-writing worlds. It’s kind of interesting to look back on my history with this blog, including both the parts of the first era (2005-2013) of what I have allowed my readers to see, and what I to this date have not allowed them to see, as well as my second era (2019-present). I much prefer my current era, specifically the content which I’ve allowed myself to post. The more I go along, the more I see how God has been changing the culture of this blog to be more about Him. For that, I am quite grateful. As I’ve mentioned before, when I brought the blog back in 2019 (I had deleted the whole thing off the website in 2013 but saved all the posts on my computer) I often found myself choosing not to reshare a whole bunch of posts because of the topics covered, or the nature in which I was sharing things.
Starting around 2017, I began a project in which I decided
to print at least one hard copy of as many musical compositions that I could,
and then organized them chronologically into binders. I wanted to prepare for
the potential (inevitable?) collapse of the internet and computers everywhere,
where, if I couldn’t access all the music that I had notated on Finale (the
music notation software I use), I at least would have a hard copy. This project
has since developed in other ways (sorry, I’m not revealing all my
secrets…), and I now have an organized inventory of pieces I’ve written over
the years, including a predeveloped organized system in which to put future
compositions. I think about other composers (Beethoven specifically) whose office
was an utterly disorganized mess of papers. To this day, I still marvel that his
friends and accomplices were able to preserve all the works that they were able
to preserve!
I wasn’t always this organized with my compositions in this
way. My previous system (which wasn’t bad, per se) consisted of sketches
staying in their spiral-rung notebooks, and halfway-done notation projects on
Finale sitting in various folders in my computer. It really wasn’t bad at all,
but what I realized I didn’t like was that, although they were essentially
fully composed, they weren’t necessarily ready for distribution at rehearsal.
And the ones that were, were mostly pieces I wrote in my composition classes in
college that I didn’t particularly care for.
In 2017, that changed. For a couple of years during that
time, I was blessed with a season of opportunities to perform original works at
a restaurant that prioritizes original songwriting for their musical acts. I
probably did about 10 or so different gigs during that time, some which were solo
keyboard gigs, some in which I invited one or two of my bands, and at least one
other where I had one other performer onstage to mix things up. There were two
gigs, however, that stood out above the rest, as it pertained to the raw
experience of having group ensemble compositions performed. One was in August
and the other was in December, just right before Christmas. Fun and elation
aside, these were two of the gigs (especially the first) that kick-started a
necessity to have current compositions finished and formatted and ready for distribution,
if necessary.
One other thing that started happening, as the project
progressed from the pieces that I was most likely to perform at these gigs, to
other compositions that I hope to get performed someday but don’t have a platform,
to even other compositions I’d long forgotten about but still had sitting in a
folder somewhere: particularly music from the last category, I began writing
little stories about several of the pieces, about how they came to be, how (or
why) they got the title they did, or even what I was thinking at the time I wrote
(or in some cases, improvised) the number. And I believe this is the point of today’s
post: I’ve already begun integrating my two writing worlds. As I’ve begun
developing the habit of occasionally writing in literary notes to go along with
the musical ones, I started doing it occasionally even in my sketchbooks of new
pieces, as I’m writing them!
It is off this point that brought me here to this question:
what if I started posting some of these things on to the blog?
I do want to remain careful; because music is an integral
part of not only who I am but also who God made me to be, the risk remains of
turning this blog into a personally invasive diary. It would be good for me to
also remember: what again is the main purpose of this space? It keeps
developing, and I’m realizing I’d like to maintain the flexibility to let it
gradually change over time. That, and like my music-making, I do still believe
I must do everything I can to ensure that this blog honors God, yes, even the
God of the Bible.
Still, even within those parameters, I’ve secretly marveled
at how so many bloggers over the years were able to keep their posts topical
but interesting. (And then I’d look at mine and wonder what, if anything I
could do to make mine as topical and interesting as theirs, without doing
something that’s already been done. There are enough wine, hiking, and
family-themed blogs out there already.) The bottom line is, I think God may
have given me an idea.
More to come.