Piano Solo and the Creative Process

An interesting impromtu with context!


There’s quite a story, read on for elucidation.


I get a lot of requests for sheet music. The short story is – I don’t have any. I decided to post how I get these pieces, seeing as how I’m not hovering over a sheet of staff paper busily rubbing out bad notes. These pieces are not complicated. They’re usually built on a single simple idea. In the case of Moonstone, I got it in my head somewhere to try playing something on only the black keys – but try to make it not sound like it was all played on the black keys.
Hopefully. if you played this piece for someone and asked “what is interesting about this piece?” they would not say: “It was played only on the black keys of a piano.”
If you download the entire recording, the thing at the end is also only on black keys.
The Beginning
Today, I came to my piano and found dust on the keys. This is bad. I don’t remember that ever happening since I bought my first piano. You don’t cure this with a duster. You play: All the notes in all the keys. And so I did. I played things I knew, and a bunch of scales. I also made up a few scales and practiced those.
Creation
Then I hit “Record”, and so started this session (at around 3am). It is about 16 minutes of me playing various things in my head. There are five or six main theme changes in it. Most of it is bad. But this is what it sounds like on a random day when I play random things.
Fifteen minutes and change later, I hit stop and looked at what happened. There happened to be one well-formed (though not perfect) piece in the middle. There are seeds of a couple more that I might revisit some day.
The piece I pulled out is not perfectly executed as per what was in my head – sometimes they are. But it was close enough that I didn’t feel I needed to go back and re-record, or fix it up.
Sharing
That’s it folks! No paper, no notes, no nothing, just playing late at night – and that’s what you get. There aren’t any mistakes or false starts, just things that are better than others. I find the better things, and put them online.
Coming up with titles is a problem. I no like be creative with words. I took a trip to Google and looked for “New Age Title” thinking it would come up with something useful I could steal. My site was number 4 on the list. Hrm… well – I can’t steal from me.
Eventually, I found this gem. A fantasy novel title generator. It is a goldmine! I’m going to use it until it runs out of ideas. Coming up with titles can often take longer than writing-recording-editing-encoding-and-uploading.
These web site updates can also be arduous. I hope you enjoyed it. Let me know what you think!