I wrote this during the constant on-and-off time-outs in a technical rehearsal of this show I was working on. The paper on which I wrote it has been sitting around my room for a month and a half and I finally put it into the computer for everyone to enjoy.
I don’t have much to say about it musically, except that it’s the sort of thing I tend to write when I’m not trying to do anything in particular, and, especially, when I only write a couple bars at a time and then stop and pick up again later, a process that is frequently voluntary but in this case was enforced by the circumstances. And this: when I got to the rising question-mark phrase of bar 55, someone at the rehearsal heard me picking it out and started humming it. When he asked what it was and I said I was just making it up as I went, he said he really liked that phrase and felt like it should repeat several times. It’s rare that you get the opportunity for an impartial “audience member” to give such specific compositional advice right when it’s applicable, so I felt like I really ought to do what he said – I didn’t have any other plans, after all. So I did, and it repeats over and over until the piece runs out. In retrospect I’m not sure that was the right thing to do – when I listen to it now I can feel someone else’s hand nudging the wheel at that point. But probably nobody else could.
Also, let me be the first to say that bar 27 sucks. It’s not, as I convinced myself at the time, a fun kind of clumsiness. It’s just clumsiness.
This is a lame non-title but I don’t have a title for it and this is lame enough that it still feels to me genuinely untitled, whereas putting “Untitled” at the top seems somehow obnoxious and thus ruins the purity of actual untitledness. Having an obviously dismissable title seems to me closer to being untitled. Or whatever; I know it’s lame, is the point. I’ll hear title suggestions but I don’t expect to take any of them.
The score
(an exact copy of the handwritten score, no dynamics, no nothing, deal with it)
I like it.