Composition

I've messed around with composing for a while, but not in any serious way. I'd do arranging of various pieces for the instruments I play, and this would've started...either in grade eight or nine? I remember a friends' parents were having a little outdoor garden party thing, and asked if their kid, me, and another friend wanted to play something. So we found some arrangements for flute/clarinet/cello, and wrote one of our own, arranging the Zozo theme from Final Fantasy VI. That was surely the first time I wrote any music, even if it wasn't my own original melody.

But it was one of those lessons we get regularly in life, that you can do things, and all you have to do is, you know, do them. But at the time I kind of saw this as a one off, focusing on musical performance, writing, programming. One of us clearly learned the lesson. Within a year or two, my friend was making electronic music, and then other friends joined in. Maybe he joined in and the others were first. It was a long time ago.

I kept playing till I didn't. Various instruments. Moved across the country a couple of times, lugging my instruments with me, starting on music lessons once I got to where I am now and had the means to do so. This was maybe one of the best decisions of my life, the way guitar has become this central thing to me. I worked through RCM books with my teacher for a couple years, got into electric guitar a bit, bought a Strat, received my brother's old Squier Tele, no longer played nor wanted. But I was always playing. This wasn't going anywhere - friendships are hard for me, playing out maybe harder, so everything was always for my own pleasure, which is valid! But it was always about playing.

Mostly. Maybe a dozen years ago I was messing around on my classical guitar with this arpeggiation pattern, and was like, huh, maybe there's something in this. Kept working on it, and writing, and eventually had a piece. Played it for my teacher, who liked it. But this was, again, a one-off. Back to playing, back to Renaissance lute and vihuela music.

A few years ago, one of my childhood friends died. This was just after the start of COVID, during the lockdowns in mid 2020, and I didn't find out till a couple of years later, when I was looking him up online to see what he'd been doing. And it hit me hard. We weren't best friends, but played D&D all through my teenage years with the two other musicians I played with at that garden party. And there was so little about him online. He led a private, or at least an offline, life. So I wrote a piece of guitar music, dedicated it to him.

This cracked the door open a little further. Last year, I did a lot (and I mean, a _lot_) of composition for a particular project. Dozens of pieces, a few of them of significant length and instrumentation. I spent the first two thirds of 2024 hunched over my laptop, headphones on, going bar by bar in my composition software, listening to the harmonies, adding textures.

That project was/is mostly done. I've updated a few things this year. But I also started writing more and more pieces for guitar, adding them to a larger collection. This is ongoing, and I hope will be forever-ongoing for me in the same way that one of my software projects is: less something to complete than a zen garden of ideas and enjoyment. Open-ended. Right now I'm playing around with alternate tunings for pieces. The first time I encountered different tunings beyond just lowering a note (G to F# for vihuela/lute tuning, low E to D in a lot of contexts) was Tarrega's famous Tango, which lowers the low E to D, and A to G. But I haven't written much in different tunings. That's changing this summer, I hope - I've had a couple ideas, one of which is in a CGCGBE tuning, the other using what I've heard called "ethereal", by Ichika Nito (DAC#F#C#D).

I'm famous for making great summer plans and then torpedoing them. I'm hoping this holds, that I'm able to get a couple of pieces written by the time my lessons start up again in the fall. I'm also going to start learning a guitar arrangement of Super Mario 2, one of my favourite NES games. It's sort of the ugly duckling of the series, but I had it when I was a kid and loved it. It's weird and awkward and different. The sort of thing I'm drawn to, always.