Musings of a Composer

 My fiddle tune The Wild One has had its own remarkable life — it’s been recorded 15 or so times by different groups, including one I only recently discovered, a Scottish band called CherryGrove. They released a 4 track EP in 2015 called No Time Like Now (enhanced edition), where the first track paired Midnight Cruise to Inverie by Patsy Reid with my piece The Wild One, in a rousing rendition — very fun!  https://projects.handsupfortrad.scot/folkwaves/wild-one-by-cherrygrove/ I wanted to find out how these musicians knew about my tune, so after some intensive google research I was able to send off emails to a couple of the members of that group (by finding their names associated with other groups!). I suggested a tune exchange, and sent them Into the Light. Well I heard back early this last week from Grant McFarlane, the accordion player, who liked my Wild One tune very much and also enjoyed Into the Light. The tune he sent me was a big delight, a jig called Paisley Welcomes t...

The saga continues! I was challenged by this same musican/performer to notate my piece as a Slide, in 12/8 with equal subdivisions of 3,3,3,3.  So I googled what Irish Slide means, and listened to some examples. I've played a fair amount of Irish fiddle music, but I don't think I'd ever played a slide before, so the research was illuminating. Next I took my piece Joy and re-wrote it as a slide, although I'm not following the form as strictly as I should.  Here's what the first 2 measures look like:    After playing it through, I do think it has a cute feel to it, and it rips right along, which is one of the points of a Slide, from what I can tell! However, it is a very different piece now, compared to my original Joy. Fun experiment!

 On Mother’s Day I gave a short house concert for 3 listeners, in our living room (where I usually compose, play, notate, etc.) — and it was very fun. Bear wanted to honor Helen with me playing her piece for her, and she invited a friend to come as well. I was focused in that way I remember from years ago on all of the setup, like seating, and where would I play, and what feels comfortable. All so that I could feel supported and free to express, and the audience would be supported and free to listen deeply. And it all worked well! The event lasted about 45 minutes, with maybe 25-30 minutes of playing, and I got to talk about how I compose, and I even made up a piece for the other guest based on his last name to illustrate how the process works, and lo and behold a reasonable piece was coming out of my fingers. I was in the flow! Afterwards I was still elevated from the experience, and very happy that it turned out so well, and that I was able to speak easily and manage my reactions...

 I needed to finish composing one of them, an older piece I originally sketched out for the Kitchen Theatre’s production of The Clean House by Sarah Ruhl, but never ended up using — it turned out to be the wrong feel for the scene — Balcony Dance. But I recently re-discovered the pencilled notation for the main section and have enjoyed playing it and messing around with it, and then on Saturday suddenly all the stars lined up and I could compose a bridge for it. My experience of composing is often a sort of mixture of divine inspiration or channeling, where I’m taking down what I hear in my head for the melody, and then doing what feels like the “work” of notating it, fixing any less-than-ideal melodic lines, figuring out what chords I’m hearing, playing it for rhythmic feel, learning what the piece is really expressing. All of these activities are lots of FUN and create big joy in my life! But I don’t always know in advance which type of activity I’m suited for on a particular day...

 Yes, I now have 61 pieces registered at MLC, it took several tries to do the bulk upload correctly, but all due to errors on my part in preparing the spreadsheet, and I was very impressed that their interface caught the errors and let me cancel and start over. Nice! We’ll see if this leads to any remuneration — there is always a delay in payments, but supposedly coming up in June 2021 will be the beginning of the MLC making the back payments for uses that were never paid out over many years at Spotify, Amazon, Apple, Pandora, etc. The MLC received millions of dollars from those Digital Service Providers, and once they receive all the data on the uses from them, will attempt to straighten out who is supposed to get what. This sounds like a nightmare, doesn’t it? Well-intentioned. The MLC starts with the data from the Harry Fox Agency, so anyone who didn’t register their pieces with HFA needs to do it directly with MLC. I hope The MLC is successful.