In 2021, a year after an accident that injured my right hand, I was working on composing some piano pieces that I could play with my remaining technique. I composed a few and thought “hey, I think these have substance.”. Inspiration struck: a concept of a suite of “Poems sans Parole” (a play on the “Songs without Words” piano suites of the Romantic Period). Being “Poems” rather than “Songs”, the pieces are shorter. A perfect post-retirement project.
I played several of the pieces for some pianists I greatly respect and got uplifting feedback and encouragement. I was inspired! I was energized!
But by fall 2022 I’d been bitten savagely by the bug to “dig out”: too many artifacts clogged my path. Music scores, keyboards, electronic “gadgets” – all around me I stumbled over these ARTIFACTS! Keyboards leaned smugly against bookcases, boxes of music (from sketches to final scores) loaded shelves and corners of closets. Grrr.
All these seemingly good artifacts – evidence of joyful times, past inspirations, hard work that yielded personal successes – how was it these good things now had me in a chokehold?
I needed to DIG OUT in order to get my head, heart and studio organized for this new music composition project. No way around it: I needed to DIG OUT to DIG IN.
Some people I know let go of “things” easily – even things from the past that were once dear to them. But as the child of a hoarder, I have to face how hard it is for me to clear out artifacts of my creative self as well as family mementos. It’s slow going for me, often accompanied by annoyingly melancholy strumming of heartstrings.
More than a year later I am… still only… (what!?!)… only partially DUG OUT. ? Still, I’m sure (well, pretty sure) that I can reclaim inspiration for my Piano Poems suite and other musical projects.
Like digging out, digging in progresses just one step after another.
PHOTO LEGEND: Recently, I got to sorting and jettisoning the contents of 2 large boxes of music. These are : (A.) compositional road maps; (B.) examples from inspirational teachers; and (C.) stuff from my graduate courses plus thesis project. (D.) Also, from Atari games, I found initial composition work for “Primal Rage” as well as its 60-page dot-matrix printout of the code for its final score (D.).