Older, but no wiser

Although I enjoy playing and listening to music, composition isn’t something that comes easily. Well, thats an understatement - most of the time it doesn’t come at all. But every once in a while I’ll sit at the piano, start messing around with some chords and things start to happen. The notes begin to flow, and so long as I don’t think too hard about it something evolves. Nothing very special, probably quite banal and full of musical cliches (mind you, musical cliches never did Andrew Lloyd Weber any harm), but still quite pleasing to the ear - or to my ears at any rate.

Yesterday evening was like that. I was feeling a bit low. My wife was watching Moulin Rouge on DVD, and the energy of the music got through to me and reminded me of all the times that music, and musical theatre, have found their way past my outer defences and through to touch my soul. So I sat at the piano (well, Clavinova to be precise) and played whatever was released.

For some reason though I have trouble with beginnings. Middles and endings are OK (-ish), but beginnings I have difficulty with. I haven’t figured out why yet. Maybe its easier to develop an idea than to create a truly original idea out of nowhere.

I could try and work on a beginning, but for the time being I’ll leave what was created as fragment - a little piece of feeling that fell out of a brief moment when some musical centre in my mind managed to connect directly with my fingers and bypass the usual hurdles of logic and judgement