I often find that some little tune I’ve made up is running over and over in my head. These tunes are generally characterized by being both cheesy and a little iggly, a little sour. I’m not sure what it says about me or my musical imagination, but these slightly squidgy little ditties are my natural musical product, they’re what I come up with when I’m completely unselfconscious. Just like everyone’s got their own standard output when doodling with a pencil; it’s something like that.
The arrangement of this particular tune is probably a little too convincing. Part of the appeal of the first six notes, when they first occured to me, was that they were nauseatingly wrong, in a chromatic way. Iggly, if you will. In putting it all together, I think I may have diluted that quality too much. That’s always hard for me in doing compositional work; when I want to preserve some appealing weirdness, I tend to find that I’ve erred on one side or another; either I leave it too raw and arbitrary/clumsy-sounding, or I somehow overwhelm it with convention. The latter is probably the more artistically responsible way to lean, but it can be disheartening to find that your original interesting intentions have disappeared inside something unrelievedly bland.
As here. Cheese and iggle fought it out and cheese won more ground than I intended. And the ground held by iggle (the slightly awkward chord progressions, especially in the middle) now just sounds unskilled rather than dreamy. Oh well.
The battle between cheese and iggle – or, properly, between convention and novelty – seems to be one of the fundamental challenges of all creative work, but I don’t know that I’ve ever heard any wisdom about how to think about this conflict, other than basic “be original but be well-versed in convention” stuff.
After all this, this little musical fart is going to seem really ridiculous. Without further ado: this stupid tune.
After listening to that, I can’t get “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” out of my head.
I was actually going to mention “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” in relation to this, but it slipped my mind when I was writing it up. What I was going to say is that when I listen to this recording but I haven’t been thinking about the tune beforehand, the rhythm tricks me. That opening’s pretty misleading. My ear, like yours and I assume everyone else’s, wants it to be the rhythm of “you’ll be SWELL! you’ll be GREAT!” But actually, my original conception of this tune (as seen in the score) places the downbeat one eighth AFTER that third note, rather than on it. I was going to say it’s like the Bugs Bunny song “This Is It,” but that’s got the downbeat on the FIRST note. I can’t think what song it’s like. Anyway, yes, though it’s supposed to be heard in a different rhythmic position, it’s very hard for even me not to hear it as a deformed “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” Just another way in which I didn’t handle this correctly.
Though I do enjoy it when rhythms throw the downbeat into doubt like that. If you hear it as “You’ll be SWELL!” then you end up hearing some weird slipping and sliding later, as well as a kooky, spastic accompaniment throughout. Wish I could say that was my intention.
Okay, I just played it again, a little faster and with more snap, and the new recording is much clearer, to my ears, about where the downbeat is. It’s funny how little a difference in emphasis it takes to change a thing like that. Of course, in the morning I may hear this one wrong too.