Creating a space for creation
To wrap up this series of posts, I'd like to tell you about how the space in which I have been composing is itself a kind of composition.
The notebook for Dulcimer Dances was originally constructed as a sample “music journal” for my 4th through 6th Grade “Chamber Music Club” that I taught every Friday this past year. Painted cardboard – purple on the front, yellow on the back – and on each cover a single sticker illustrating a pair of eighth notes in the color not used as that side’s base. As a special touch, a pressed fall leaf serves as a trumpet-like emblem. However, I quickly realized that the atmosphere of the “Chamber Music Club” was such that this journal idea became irrelevant.
It seemed appropriate then to use my purple and yellow composing space for my Dulcimer Dances project, as a journal seemed the perfect place to begin writing my first “open-ended” composition.
Inside the notebook can be found 4 sections, laced together by a strip of leather:
- Lined journal pages, for writing thoughts about or related to the project
- Graph paper, for sketching compositional ideas
- Plain white paper, each piece with two systems of three-line TAB staves drawn on them; these, for tracing the immediate physicality of the dances
- Music staff paper, for writing out the pitches of the music written in the TAB section; these, to aid me and any would-be practitioners in the comprehension of the melodic and harmonic constructs that underlie the work’s physicality
The dulcimer and its journal I keep on top of my composing shelf, always available for me when I wish to enter a slow-moving, meditative composing space. They offer me a space that is musical, creative, but without the pressures of more constrained projects. This new mode of making music affords me the freshness of discovery as well as the comfort of simplicity, and a kind of directness that is very nearly indulgent.
Other things I have dreamed of including in the Dulcimer Dances book are:
- blank pages (or guided blank space) for the practitioners own compositional work and/ or note-taking
- notation of Sarah’s versions of traditional tunes
- instructions for making the tunes or dances more participatory, in a way similar to Talismane (from few parts emerge many – coordinated to varying degrees)
- longer and more elaborate versions of the tunes (for concert presentation)
- ensemble versions of the pieces
- etudes that prepare players for the pieces
- texts
But, my mind always scatters into too many disparate thoughts, and for once I’d like to start with the simplest version of the idea and allow for complexities to emerge over time.
