There’s a picture of me, as a kid, that I think really looks like me.
If you care to argue that all pictures of us look like us, then I respectfully disagree. I have what has been commonly called a “high forehead”, high meaning “substantial” (or I think a better description might be “unavoidable”). I inherited this head from my grandfather, and the worst thing people used to say about it is “you must have a lot of brains in there” which isn’t really an insult. I say the worst thing ‘people used to say’ rather than ‘kids used to say’ because grown adults, quite recently, have said this to me about my forehead before any cocktails had been poured. That’s apparently how many brains are in there.
I’ve gotten used to it now, and thankfully for the moment have preserved my hairline if not the lustrous thickness of scalp fur past. For a while I wanted nothing more than David Cassidy’s hair; the lead singer of a band called “The Partridge Family”. He had a gentle 70’s wavy kind of vibe that didn’t completely cover his eyes but kinda swirled around his face a little… definitely not bangs but I recognized it as an absolutely groovy way to somewhat distract from the front of my giant skull. But as time went on I grew into my head. Which sounds like something to say to a therapist. But I digress.
The reason I feel that this particular childhood photo looks like me has most to do with proportion. You’re born with head parts but then they shift in relation to one another until the time that they suddenly don’t do that anymore and there YOU are. Nothing exceptionally different, but everything finally in the right place, and in the right proportion. It takes a while.
I’m walking a parallel path to that as a composer… bits of music have been in my head for years, and I’ve captured them on whatever was available at the time. Cassette tapes, answering machines, manuscript paper, bar napkins. But if I play those recordings I don’t really hear them, instead I hear what the music is supposed to sound like. What it should sound like, when it’s finished.
My composing really took off around seventh grade, when my mother brought home what she thought was a broken cassette player from school: but I fixed it, and along with the cassette recorder we had already I’d tape one part, then play that loud while I sang another, and layer instruments until I was a brown little band.
Now, I am very lucky. I’ve worked really hard and invested in instruments and computer software that allow me to actually, every now and then, make the music that I actually hear in my head. This is essential because I don’t have a spare room in my basement where a symphony orchestra just hangs out waiting for me. I don’t actually have a basement. Or a spare room. But I’ve studied for hundreds of hours and developed a treasured relationship with a company called Sweetwater (the world’s greatest online music shop) that might best be compared to a musical kind of Stockholm Syndrome, and now I can actually share the music I’ve been hearing for, in many cases, a lot of decades.
What’s most impressive is that the music’s still there. All these tapes should have been destroyed in the earthquake, or the hurricane, or lost in one of the 17 moves, or warped in the hot metal storage space or infested with the deadly mold… my life has been a comic book, and the fact that I can even remember the music is a logistic miracle. But it’s stayed with me.
There’s a thing about cooking that most people have; they would make a fancy meal if someone was coming over for dinner but wouldn’t spend the same amount of time making that same meal for themselves because food is better shared. I do not feel the same way about music; music’s more than food, it’s medicine, and I don’t need to share aspirin to appreciate it.
But I’m gonna. It’s a good time to settle down and find warm socks and get something knit or learn a new game or just whittle some. So I am going to make, finally, a picture of my music, with everything in proportion and balance and all the pieces in the right place, and I’m not only sharing the end result, but the whatever this is before the end result. Process, yes, thank you. And at this point, right now, I’m less driven by harmony, rhythm and counterpoint, and more fascinated with the sustain. These sounds inside my head have sustained, through the entirety of my very odd life.
Yeah, we’re all still here, that’s not really impressive. But, y’know, isn’t it? It kinda is. All of us, still happening, still ringing, still in the air, still music.
I think it’s impressive. We’ll see about my art thing, but we’re all pretty cool.
Sustain.