On composing

I’ve heard music in my head as far back as I can remember. I can remember all the car rides as a kid, lights streaming by dark nights on endless California freeways, staring out the window at the reflected lights off the dash, hearing whole symphonies, movement by movement, plenty of time to work out all the development sections.

If you sit and listen and concentrate, you realize, gradually, the hums of all the electronics, all the machines, the refrigerator, the computer, the fans, the cars outside, the planes overhead, and the more you listen, the more you hear, the louder it gets, until even when you focus, it is difficult to dial it down. That’s how it is for me with the music in my head.

In the presence of live music, recorded music, I hear a rainbow of harmonies, cross-rhythms, counterpoint. It’s hard for me to sing melody in a group with all the thirds and fifths and sixths echoing in my head. In orchestras, I’m happiest in the center, second violin, fourth chair or so, where I sit amid woodwinds and brass and percussion and lower voices and place my harmonies amidst it all.

With great care and practice, I learned to translate the music in my head out my fingers, improvising on violin. It took years until I was comfortable. The music kept playing in my head, but my fingers only cooperated with painstaking practice. And it has been like that learning to write the music, also.

My father, at my request, tried long and hard to imprint music theory on my untaught mind. I resisted both consciously and unwillingly. I wanted to try new things, to break the rules; the music in my head didn’t fit the patterns I was learning. The formality of the notes on the page, carefully placed in their time-honored patterns, mocked me. I was intractable.

Somewhere, somehow, it must have sunk in, somewhat at least. And yet this writing process these last few weeks has been an exercise in mental exhaustion. I force myself to translate shapes and colors and things from my head into dots and lines on their several staves, to filter out voicings, to hear both the long phrase and to work out the single measure’s rhythm, to impose formal structures on the sweeps and swirls; to make the head-music reproducible by others than me.

And I research like I’m writing a novel: how to write for harp, for banjo; not only how to notate, but how to play the instruments – what sounds good and what does not; the playable and the simply awkward.

I fit it in here and there – on the train, during a quick lunch break, on the bus, at home before my roommate arrives each night. If I work too long all at once though, my head literally starts to ache from all the concerted effort. But if I try to take a break, the unwritten music pounds incessantly in my head in an unceasing loop, until I cave, until I write it down, until it’s in a final, revised & edited form; only then does the music in my head quiet down to manageable levels.