Years ago, as a teenager, I started writing music, in response to an assignment from my high school music teacher. Like most of the other kids, I fumbled through it, with limited success. But I was fascinated enough by the process to try again.
Fifty-six years later, I’m still trying. Though I get much better results now, after years of study and practice. I’m also still fascinated.
That is, despite becoming disenchanted with the idea of having a career in music. The details of that process are, I promise you, intensely uninteresting. But at some point, I realized that I have no interest in teaching or performing. The only thing I like about writing music is writing it. For me, composing has nothing to do with earning a living, and I preferred to keep the two activities separate. Instead of pursuing a career in music, and following several false starts, I fell into advertising. After landing on my face, I spent thirty years writing functional, commercial copy for a living.
That way, my music was never constrained by anything other then my own limitations. None of which is to say I think less of composers of all sorts who do make a living from composing. It just isn’t for me.
In my case, writing music is about the multiple layers of satisfaction I reach with each piece. At the simplest level, there’s an aspect to composing that’s not too different from solving one of those intricate wood block puzzles. Slightly more nuanced, is a delight in combining disparate sounds into new combinations. But in my cleverer moments, I hear music as a language. Regardless of style, composers have to create a “vocabulary” of sounds and arrange them into cogent statements that add up to a unique form of communication.
But the smartest reason I write music is that it enables me to express thoughts, memories and emotions that I can’t get across otherwise, even in intimate conversation. Writing music enables me “to be me” more than anything else I do.
The downside of the path I took is that I lost contact with performers. To realize my compositions, I rely on a computer notation program that enables me to playback each score through emulated electronic instruments. While the program makes a generic effort to “humanize” the playback, these electronic renditions lack many of the nuances that real, live musicians inevitably lend to each performance. These renditions also lack spatial depth. They are acoustically “flat.”
At the same time, they give much more than a general idea of the emotional curve, logic and form of my compositions. There’s enough evidence on my YouTube channel of what my music “is about,” in works for solo piano, chamber ensemble, string orchestra, full orchestra and soloist with orchestra. Vocal music doesn’t come naturally to me. You’ll find no songs, choral works, comic operas or grand musical dramas. Though thousands of composers have found a poem or a text a liberating point of departure for elaborate flights of fancy, to me, a text slows me down. I can’t follow my train of thought because it simply takes too long to load the words into the baggage compartment.
If I have an audience, it’s made up of whoever might stumble onto my YouTube page, find my Facebook music page or come across a limited selection of my works on SoundCloud. Once in a while I receive a positive comment, and it makes me smile. Then I go back to composing, for as much time as “Causality” allows on any given day.
^^^
Mark Laporta is a musician, composer and novelist. His science fiction series, Against the Glare of Darkness, is published by Chickadee Prince Books, and is available in paperback or ebook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or at a bookstore near you.
Image design by Kalyee Srithnam.