Under my nails

There is only so much romanticising we can do about our music. When we compose we are, indeed, in that same space of mind as our 18th century predecessors. We may be staring at the keys of a 150 year old piano. We are solving the same problems they were working on. We may be experiencing a great deal of the thrill and frustration they experienced, but 5 minutes later, we are back in the real world. Our world. Modernity.

Everything we write is composed against a backdrop of our own moment in time. And I caution to add that for virtually all of us, that includes some degree of finacial struggle. It is always a bit disgraceful to me to come in from the yard where I may have been working on my car and sit right down at the piano, or guitar. There are traces of black grease under my nails. My piano hasn't earned this. Music should be vaunted and heavenly. I'm carrying the mudane over into the sublime.

But that is our backdrop. And consider this. If the world outside were already heavenly, music would provide little lift.

So I'm turning this bolt under the hood of my car. I'm using a wrench. And I realize that the wrench does not really lend a hand. It doesn't input any energy into the system. It just redirects energy and concentrates the force I put into turning the bolt. Really. You can try it for yourself. Set down a wrench on the fender of your car and see if it does anything without you. No it doesn't. It just sits there in its happy stupidity.

All the work done is done by us, but the wrench allows us to do so much more because it redistributes our energies.

So I'm jumping around through music structures and I find a nice surprise. This is one of those surprises that you've had before but they have escaped you because you haven't engrained them into your composing repertoire. I'm writing in Cm here. I Go from Cm to Ab then rather than jump to a new triad, I revamp the ab into a diminshed chord for its own measure. Right, so there's nothing at all about wrenches in their yet. I resolve the progression to the root (Cm) and foray off to the second half of this 8 bar romp.

In the second half of the passage the wrench comes in. We begin with an Fm in place of the Cm. We return to our Ab and Ab dim. But here we can torque more richness out of the Abdim by cramming a G augmented in with it each occupying only half a measure. The pattern more triumphantly resolves to the root of Cm.

So the pattern looks like this:

Cm | Ab | Abdim | Cm | Fm | Ab | Abdim Gaug | Cm

By the way, augnmented chords for me are like a cellphone in the hands of a monkey. I am clearly not so deft with them. I bang'em around and every now and then something comes out of it that sounds interesting. Thus, whenever I find a way to use one that actually works, I'm probably going to write about it. Perhaps some logic will emerge once I see a pattern in my observations.

So there.