More from my 30's

My approach to composition has changed over the years.  When I was a kid I was enamored with the idea of music as a science and so studied everything I could get my hands on.  Initially it was stuff like Walter Piston's books, which were very traditionally spun. This stuff was cool because it gave me the theoretical fundamentals that I would need when I moved to more modern harmonic concepts.  With each successive concept that I would study I would compose a piece based on it.  For instance, when I started reading about modal harmony, I set out to build a piece that would harmonically and melodically imply each mode.  One mode, one piece.  I did this through the major scales, melodic minor, harmonic major, etc…  From head to pen to paper.  Mind you, I wasn't playing any of this shit yet.  I wasn't really even shedding.  Study, compose, study, and compose.  At certain points I would have my mother play some of it on the piano for me or take it to school and have people play it (I was 16 at this time – I also dropped out of school during this time).  At the time I ran out of 'scales' to do this to, was during the time I realized that the music I was writing was impure.  By that I mean that I often times wrote the harmony first. I realized that harmony was the *consequence of melody* and that the first thing to be written should be the melody.  This caused me to completely change the way that I approached composing.  This was also the time that I was really getting into jazz.  Now, you can imagine the conundrum this created.  Everything that I was being exposed to when studying this music from a compositional/harmonic perspective was vertical and I had just had the epiphany that harmony was actually horizontal layers of melody that make an impression or halo around the main voice.  This didn't go over well in my harmony and arranging classes.  This is also around the time that I started really shedding my instrument.  I was shedding the pieces I had been writing for the past few years (which were angular buckets of crap).  When I had to play in ensemble classes the only shit I had under my hands to work with were my tunes, so I would take bits of those and try to use them in whatever way I could.  I used to get my ass chewed!  It was around this time that I realized that the only way I was going to be able to play the stuff was to develop a strong sense of time and rhythm (still working on it).  This carried into my composing as well.  I made exercises for myself to see if I could take something that sounded like crap and have it come across as convincing, it didn't always work.  At this time I was trying to write melodies that grooved.  Later on, I realized that the 'composer me' and the 'improviser me' are the same person.  When I play I am composing, and vice versa.

To skip ahead a number of years to now:  my composing now is almost entirely devoid of any harmony other than what is implied by the melody (I am not sure why this is).  Sometimes I may write a voice for the bass to play, often not, though (other than some piano quintet stuff from about 4 years ago, this stuff is so dense it will give you a headache).  The last batch of pieces that I wrote (which Life in The Washing Machine came from) I was leaning over my piano as a desk in candle light shaking from the adrenaline surges…

There is so much more (more on harmony, meter, cross rhythms, etc), but I will stop there…