For a few weeks now (though not while I was abroad
on vacation), I’ve been working on transcribing what I had written of a major
composition before my instance of Musescore 1.3 running on a Windows XP virtual
machine (all “dinosaurs,” so I’m really glad I now have a latest-version laptop
equipped with latest-version software) decided to crash in the most
spectacularly bad way I’ve ever seen an app behave after a crash. Essentially,
after the crash, everything that could have gone wrong with the software went
wrong. The score looked terribly wrong (the time and key signatures were in weird
places, the staff suddenly only had 3 lines and then would magically expand to
6 and contract again, and all kinds of other problems), so at least the file I was
really interested in, was gone, for all intents and purposes. Now, keep in
mind, this happened right after my seconds semester of senior year started in
January. Just a few weeks earlier, as I was unwinding either from studying for
my finals or taking them and I had finished writing for the night, in an
incredibly lucky episode of prescience that to this day I attribute entirely to
the guidance of the Holy Spirit by the intercession of St. Cecelia, I decided to make a PDF backup of what I had written
to that point—about 35 minutes and 900 bars’ worth, actually. Now that I have my
brand new computer with the brand new software (and I won’t even see the old VM
very regularly anymore because I’ll be an hour and a half away trying to sort
out my life in my first semester of college and I have no idea how often I’ll
be home in the beginning), I have taken upon myself the very laborious task of
reconverting the PDF into a native Musescore file.
I just graduated from high school, and during my
senior year, I took my favorite class in high school: AP Music Theory. One of
the components of the course was melodic and harmonic dictation. Basically, we
would be played either about nine chords in 20 seconds, or a melody as long as singing
just “Twinkle, Twinkle little star! How I wonder what you are!” (but not the
second half of the song) at about half the normal speed. The goal was to get as
many of the notes in the important (highest and lowest, or soprano and bass) voices
of chords written correctly, or to write down as many pitches and rhythms of the
one-voice melody correctly, just by hearing the relationship of the notes or
chords, given the first note or chord. Even with such a short exercise, this
was pretty hard.
What I’m currently doing, which can be better described
as transcription (writing down something that’s already written) rather than
dictation, seems like it would be easier, but it’s not. Other than actually playing,
this transcription is the hardest thing I’ve ever done as a musician. But that’s
really weird. Here’s why: no one else has seen this piece before, and it tells
a story, my story over one year from April 2017 to April 2018 (more on this when
I actually finish). Edward Elgar said of the theme of his Cello Concerto’s
first movement that, if anyone heard someone whistling that tune in the Scottish
Hills, it was his spirit, and that that theme was what he believed the essence
of his personality was, expressed in musical form. There’s one theme that I’ve
written that means something similar: whenever something very important
happened in the story of my life that year that made me who I am today, “my
theme” shows up. On the other days when nothing remarkable happened, I’ve
written some filler episodes unrelated to the theme, but that link its occurrences.
Luckily for me, the theme appears at least 14 times by my count, and it’s pretty
simple. In other words, good thing I have copy-and-paste capabilities and I
only have to worry about copying the fillers I’ve already written and finding
ideas for the ones still yet to be written.
This process that started with a voice memo that
turned into a note on Google Keep, both of which were created in February 2018
while wandering the streets of Salzburg after a spontaneous idea in Mozart’s
city of birth, has led me on what has so far been an 18-month-long journey of
self-discovery and of exploration of what makes a true friend a true friend. Because
of the crash, I know the piece and myself better than I ever would have, if the
piece had been finished when I had originally planned, and because of this,
paradoxically, the crash was the greatest blessing I have so far received while
writing this piece, and I wouldn’t have had these events transpire any other
way.
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