It’s funny, the way musical ideas seem to conspire to arrive at the least convenient time they can arrange. Are they doing it on purpose? I’m picturing these little snippets of inspiration floating around on the ether, just keeping an eye on me, shooting the breeze, until the time is right.
“Hey riff…”
“Yes, interesting chord progression?”
“He’s working on that university assignment”
“What, you mean that one that had him in tears yesterday, emailing his tutor and threatening to quit uni and go back to work… again?”
“Yeah… he looks like he’s really getting his head around it now. Good job too, it’s due on Monday.”
“I’m going in.”
Meanwhile I’m typing away, constructing a detailed and ingenious argument on the extent to which Robert Dessaix’s Night Letters is a novel about art, and its ability to allow one to glimpse life in non-linear fashion (as opposed to just being a good read – which it is by the way), and all of a sudden Clare is glaring at me because I’ve been humming a little tune for the last thirty seconds and she’s trying to study too.
So I realise that the tune is actually not whatever I was halfway through listening to on the way home yesterday, and is infact somewhere near original (I once rushed home from a long walk in order to record what later turned out to be a Spice Girls song. Mortifyingly embarrassing. Remind me not to tell anyone about that). A mad dash to the other end of the house ensues, I fire up the PC, open Cubase, hit record, remember that I pulled the soundcard out last week to build up my live-rig PC and haven’t bought a second one yet, power down the PC, try and find my voice recorder, fail to find my voice recorder, grab a paper and pencil, realise the pencil is broken, hunt for my pencil sharpener, fail to find my pencil sharpener but in the process stumble across my voice recorder, switch on the voice recorder only to find the battery is flat, find another non-broken but extremely blunt pencil, and write down this:
What is that?! Honestly? I was humming it not ten minutes ago, and I couldn’t tell you now. It seems to be in A, and have twelve notes per line, but is that a chord progression over 12 bars, or a bar of 12 beats? I don’t know.
So what’s the moral of the story? I’m vascillating between “AAA batteries are not really that expensive when you think about it, in the general scheme of things”, or maybe “stop writing everything in C major and A minor – the black notes won’t kill you, you know”. I know I’ve completely lost my train of thought on that assignment though…. is it too late to withdraw from the unit?
