By Michael L. Sevy.
the melodic line that obsessed my thoughts at that moment was, perhaps, a theme or theme-adjacent/theme-supportive, and in my head where notes often gather it started logically enough, pleasing to the ear, running through a normal chord progression for some measures, if I researched I may have discovered that this chord progression was one I had used before, and at a particular moment, still in my head, the melodic line made a jump, more a shift, to an unexpected note and continued from there using that new, unexpected note, that jump, as a framework a baseline, so normal normal normal, huhwhat, newnormal newnormal newnormal, and this worked very well as a thoughtobsession but proved challenging when trying to work this out between the keyboard and the sheet music paper propped up just above the keyboard, I had penciled in the normal run, about a line and a half, five measures or five and a portion of the sixth measure because that was where the unexpected note made itself known, I forged through, to and through the unexpected note but it didn’t work like that, it was jarring, upsetting, it sounded like a wrong note when sounding off immediately after the first run of pleasing notes, I had options, choices available to me, the first that came to mind was to experiment with the chords that accompanied the melody because chords can change our understanding of the lead notes just by the company it keeps, like a rough character appearing at a formal affair the juxtaposition was off but if I changed the setting for our rough character to a seedy downtown bar, sawdust on the floor, rosacea’d men on their stools staring at their beerglasses, I was obviously thinking of a diminished chord here, maybe this would’ve worked out, it did not, the diminished chord was as unexpected as the note, I remembered that most chords are related to each other, C sharp minor has siblings in E major and A major or a difficult sibling in A major seventh and they have their cousins, close cousins like F sharp major and A flat diminished and distant cousins like B minor ninth but these proved to be poor relations, non-supportive of our odd little melody, I tried displacing the notes in time, coming a half beat after the chords almost a call and response like gospel like blues like military drills like laborers working the line or picking crop or rowing a sixteenth century ship but that only slightly delayed the discomfort, then I thought there were three choices in this timing: first, the notes coming after their respective chords which were already mentioned and although this would be the most popular type of phrasing, it did not work here, second, on the one, that is timing the notes and chords together, like clockwork like a machine would do like a jubilant crowd following the bass the bass, and though this is probably almost as popular as the call and response phrasing despite its boring premise, this also did not work for my idiosyncratic bit of melody so I finally experimented with the third choice where the phrasing comes just before the underlying chords, in other words the notes are anticipating its framework to come, not often attempted although a signature of Charles Mingus’s solos on bass, I liked this concept of anticipation, once I read with admiration of a case brought to trial of speeding where the defendant’s plea was that she had speeded up in anticipation, yes, anticipation of a higher speed limit further up ahead, a brilliant defense and useful in so many ways, always think ahead, and so I experimented with this anticipatory phrasing and it sounded wonderful in the normal section, those first five or five-and-a-half measures, but then the unexpected note caused disquiet which was immediately followed by the diminished chord which caused disquiet again, actually doubling the ill effect I was trying to remove, but before eliminating this idea, this philosophy of anticipation, I thought of a fifties science fiction film I had vague memory of, the hero had been exposed to radiation or some kind of fifties fearful ‘ray’ and seemed to have gone mad, the authority figures were perplexed until one checked a tape recording of an interrogation of the hero, tape recorders being at the height of fifties technology, Krapp’s tool of soliloquy, and what was noticed was that the hero was actually answering questions put to him ten seconds before the question was put, in other words, the hero was somehow existing in our time but ten seconds in the future, so this gave me the idea to try and shift my melodic line a full measure before the chords that form its base as if the melodic line was existing one full measure in the future quite different from Mingus’s single beat or sub-beat anticipatory phrasing and this was very interesting, unpleasant but interesting, I reserved this idea for a future endeavor, not for this project, it became clear to me that I would need some transitory device, a way to guide the listener through these notes, I still had the anticipatory method in my head so now my thoughts went to the idea of familiarizing the listener with that unexpected note in advance of its eventual appearance in my melody, perhaps I could slip it in between a couple of the earlier normal notes, sounded faintly and with short duration, hoping not to jar the ear but to prepare the listener in a subtle way, I thought this concept sound but there were no normal notes that offered themselves up for this type of intrusion, subtle or not, so I pushed back earlier yet as Murnane might say, the note heard eight measures previous to the current measure sounds its presence, yes, maybe hearing the unexpected note even before the melodic theme begins would activate some brain cells which could be called upon a short time later with its reappearance during the melodic phrase, I tried but this seemed to count on more cognitive ability than one could expect from the listener, clearly much more guidance will be needed, I will need to hold the listener’s hand and cling tightly as we traverse to the new normal, this meant to me that I would need to find some notes and perhaps some chords to fit in after the last normal note and before the unexpected note that would guide the ear but not overtake the melodic theme as first sounded in my mind, perhaps these additional notes would come off as embellishments to the melody, too much of this would negate the entire melodic concept so this too will be a difficult undertaking, Raymond Roussel’s strange factory of distorted random phrases as when ‘a nice night for love’ distorts to ‘an ice knife or low fee’ or ‘she is merely acting’ distorts to ‘che’s merry is lacking’, I tried distortions subtle and then savage but this only hinted at some other work than what I was about, I was experimenting with my phrase in the usual fourth octave but what if I moved it up to the fifth or even sixth octave, up in the sixth a melody loses its solidity, it becomes indefinite, ethereal even, one can get away with things in the sixth octave that would not pass in the fourth, but no matter how ethereal the transition was still too real, perhaps the thought that harmony was the right approach was wrong, a Leverkühnian polyphony of separate voices each standing on its own though somehow occurring sympathetically was an amazing thought but probably a concept beyond me, no Faustian agreement was made in my past to inform creative genius, so consequently abandoning delusion I tried an abrupt shift in volume, lightly so lightly brushing the keys corresponding to the challenging notes, lightness with abruptness after previously pounding and this abruptness called attention to itself and to the challenging notes so I reversed the effort, first lightness then a sudden pounce like an awkward well-fed feline which surprised and aroused sophistically, not the effect desired, I tried pausing, hands suspended inches above the keyboard, but for how long, 273 seconds was probably too long a silence in the middle of a phrase, a short silence was dependent on the memory range of the listener, a distracted listener the best to hope for but these latest thoughts required entering the consciousness of my dear listener something I am incapable of, my own consciousness was challenge enough, with a leaden foot I pushed down on the sustain pedal muddying up my phrase, undampening all the sympathetic vibrations all the frequencies under and above, chords and phrase dissonancing into itself, almost lost in a tonal fog, added appoggiatura double appoggiatura here and there between key beat notes but that just added confusion, I tried repeating again and again the phrase or segments of the phrase, I thought that looping those notes enough times it would start to sound normal, but it never did, like a standup telling a joke at every gig, the joke kills but after so many repetitions the standup loses any sense of humor and surprise in the joke, the standup questions how people can laugh at it, the repetition of repeating the joke so many times has rendered it stiff, unfunny, I started just throwing in notes, many notes between the melody notes, like Zappa rising to the challenge of cramming as many notes as possible between points A and B, even throwing in a few key changes while he’s at it, but that quickly got out of hand, at some point I decided to let the work decide for itself where it wanted to go from here, obviously it all comes from my brain my thoughts but I relinquish control I stop forcing it and ask the scrawled musical notes on the page, palimpsests proliferating, maddeningly black filled quarter notes eighth notes sixteenth notes smudging into dark oblivion, I ask all of them where do you want to go but no answer and I think I’m too close in, I’m not seeing the full view, these heuristic methods of mine will never achieve the unachievable, my mind is closing down so I step away for a moment, I stare at the books in the bookcase, I look at the window, I look out the window and try to forget my problem, a brainclearing, and let my thoughts wander in the aether but this does not bear fruit, I can only think of disruptive actions, what if I stop in the middle of the phrase and slam the keyboard cover down, what if I rip the top of the piano off and throw various objects against the soundboard, what if I scream and then pick up the phrase where I left off, enough with this composer/listener handholding, sometimes we can’t have musical phrases lead us note by note to each chord, sometimes we can’t guide others through life, sometimes we can’t offer comfort, sometimes we just stop suddenly stop and then start again elsewhere with a different note a different chord a different phrase a different life
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael L. Sevy recently retired from a career beginning in advertising (including writing and editing for various trade magazines) then working as a database administrator for a financial software company. He wrote songs and performed in 80s groups Cold Dogs in the Courtyard and Bonus Marchers.
