Creating something every day for 365 days
A trip, vacation time, a deep desire
to get away from life. The car is flying
down the state. I’m on 341,
avoiding interstates. We’re free, begun
already, driving green and vacant roads
to gain the ocean, waves, the beach, the coast.
Shooting out of Perry onto shaded
road, pecan orchards on either side,
I see the square, staked sign appear.
– / -/ -/ -/ – here|clear|near
It’s almost past me, almost gone before
I’ve read it: Georgia’s High Tech Corridor.
You may recall my mentioning that I’m borrowing a theme for the 4th movement of the symphony. Years ago I wrote a sonatina for piano four hands which had a rambunctious first theme, a gentler second theme, and for some reason a tremendously lyrical central section. That’s the theme I’m stealing:
(You can click on it to hear it.)
Here’s a quick report on my music notebook jottings: I’m better than I thought.
You may recall that one of my weaknesses as a musician is my inability to imagine a tune then write it down without resorting to a keyboard somewhere. Part of my plan is to take a music notebook with me on my evening walks and force myself to invent themes and write them down in the notebook.
After a week of this, I finally sat down to see if they sounded like what I thought they did when I wrote them.
Before I begin, I’d like to comment on a piece of software I came across this summer which has proven to be quite useful. Unlike most software I own, it has no bells or whistles. It is simplicity itself, and that is its power.
It’s called WriteRoom, and it’s a text editor. You might wonder why I would need a text editor. I already have TextEdit, AppleWorks, Pages, MS‡‡‡ Word, plus a host of other applications which can handle text. Why would I need another one, especially one which does not even allow you to indent or italicize?
As I wrote my “high tech corridor” piece, even as I was driving through Georgia’s High Tech Corridor (which got that way via House Resolution 1327 in 2001), I mused whether this impression could be expressed in a poem.
Clearly, since I wrote an essay, nothing suggested itself to me naturally, so I’m going to try this the hard way. WARNING: long and pointless post ahead.
In addition to my 365 project, I’m also embarking on a bit of a self-improvement thing. I promised myself this summer that I would begin walking for exercise each evening, and that I would use the time for this project.
One of my weakest skills as a composer is my interval-recognition abilities. You would think I would be able to hum a melody and write it right down, but history has proven that I’m pretty hit or miss about these things. I have very good relative pitch when I’m singing, so my sight-singing in a chorus is very accurate, but just making up stuff and transcribing it? Not so much.
So in order to get better at this, I have bought a Moleskine pocket notebook with music staff paper in it. I carry it with me on my walk, and I force myself to compose melodies and write them down in the notebook. I will also be using it to work on my harmonic analysis skills. Eventually, of course, I’ll get to be just like Beethoven, seized with ideas and whipping out my notebook to sketch in a symphony or two.
Last night I went for my first official walk, and other than working up a sweat, I filled eight staves with ideas for a theme for Symphony #1. I have not tested them yet to see if they sound at all correct. It also occurred to me that a sonatina for piano four-hands I wrote some years ago could yield a theme for the final movement, so I wrote that down. (To be clear, I wrote down the idea, not the theme; I couldn’t remember it exactly. I had to open up that particular piece and copy the theme this morning.)
Actually, the Beethoven example is pretty germane to what I’m trying to do with this project. He was notorious for scratching out more than he wrote. Ideas would come to him, and as he began to work on them, he found himself dissatisfied with them in some way and so began to modify them. He rewrote the opening to the Fifth Symphony at least eight times. The first attempt is recognizable, but clearly imperfect.
This is important for those of us who create with a little less giftedness than Ludwig: if someone as godlike as Beethoven couldn’t get it right the first time, why do we think we ought to? Get it out there, get it on the paper, and then revise it.
I know this, but I find it hard to follow. Back in 2004 when I was working on the “penguin opera,” I would start a piece by writing “abortive attempts” at the top of the score paper. Just go ahead and name it as a wasted attempt. Whatever I put on the page, I had no expectations of it except that it would be a failure. And then, two or three revisions later, I’d have something that worked.
But heavens how I hate it.
When you’re heading to the coast of Georgia from Newnan, you can take I-75 down to Macon and then get onto I-16. That will take you through the deadest stretches of interstate this side of the Mississippi, down to Savannah, and then you get to use I-95 down to the isles. Out of your way, but clean.
Or you can go straight there by getting onto U.S. 41 at Griffin and just staying straight on 341 all the way to Brunswick. It cuts through the state like a royal highway, and most of the time you’re alone. That is its appeal to me: no real traffic, no flocks of semi’s, no clumps of maniacs trying to go five miles per hour faster or slower than you. You’re surrounded by green, and yes, you have to slow down for the towns along the way, but to me that’s a plus.
After you squeeze through Perry you’re onto the long stretch leading to the coast. And there, in the first pecan grove, is a sign: GEORGIA’S HIGH TECH CORRIDOR.
Right, you think. On and on the road goes. It widens into four lanes, four lanes divided, more pecans, a lot more pine trees, and every now and then another sign: GEORGIA’S HIGH TECH CORRIDOR.
Only, really, it’s not. There’s nothing to indicate that this ribbon of highway is flanked by anything other than that which it’s always been flanked by: utter rurality. There aren’t even real farms anymore, just pecan groves and pine plantations, and occasionally a small town that used to serve the farmers but no longer has that purpose, nor indeed any purpose.
You check your laptop to see if, incredibly, you might be getting a wireless signal, but of course you aren’t. The endless pine trees are not wired. Perhaps they’re being raised by satellite?
Your iPod broadcasts random music to your radio that you are fairly certain, and I don’t think you’re being overly unfair to the homes you pass, that has never been heard in those homes, or even heard of: Berio, Gottschalk, Dohnányi, Adams.
You don’t dare check your cell-phone to see if you have coverage, because what would be the good in that? Knowing that you’re cut off from the outside world would only lead to feelings of uneasiness.
In fact, the only indication of any high tech in this particular corridor is a sign, hand-lettered, by a rundown shack in a nearly abandoned community. It says, “COMPUTER WORK.”
Right under that, it says, “BOILED PEANUTS.”
Where does one go from there?