composing myself

I seem to have had an attack of musical composition this morning. That’s nice. I have spent the morning composing.

Thumbing through my notebooks (literally “note” books, bound journals of music staff paper where I log musical ideas I am thinking about), I found this poem.

I am shy of sharing my poetry, especially too quickly after writing. But this is from last October.

my dead father

returns to me damaged

in my dreams

between broken harpsichords

and impossible music

10/14/11

I remember I wrote a longer poem after this along these lines. I’m not ready to share it yet. maybe never.

I guess I figure that at least music makes sense to people. But I don’t know anybody really who reads contemporary poetry. I had a retired English professor in my living room recently who seemed surprised at my collection of poetry and my interest in it. He was pleasant surprised and we chatted quite a bit about his work.

I find this a bit ironic because in the late 80s I was sitting in his living room looking at his books, feeling slightly snubbed when my interest in poetry seemed negligible to him. He obviously didn’t remember our previous conversation.

So anyway. Composing.

I have been missing composing. Improvising is fun and in the case of working with ballet classes a discipline. The improvisation must be totally understandable to the teacher and the dancers. Phrases are square. I have actually found this discipline pretty liberating.

I do need some real down time in order to compose. I have been at my most productive compositionally years ago when I briefly lived along in northern Michigan. I had a fun time just making up music. That’s how I think of it, anyway. I remember taping sketches to a piece I was working on all over the walls of the place I was living.

Today I first jotted down ideas when I got up in my notebook, but moved quickly to Finale.

I found the software facilitated my writing this morning. Sometimes it doesn’t. But today I got sucked in and simply used it to write down ideas as I was having them. I little to no cutting and pasting.

This is kind of the joke of Finale. You can write great minimalism which involves lots of repetition (hence facilitated by cutting and pasting).
I started pinteresting yesterday. The stupid web site/program offered to connect me to a bunch of people I didn’t recognize with whom it had determined I had common interests. Boy was it wrong. I finally figured out how to eliminate them from my pinterest board this morning. Sheesh.
I had a very nice day off yesterday. Lots of time for practicing and reading. I think that helped me concentrate this morning and do some composing.
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Malcom X: Mapping a Life

Thanks to daughter Elizabeth for pointing this cool web site out to me. It’s an interactive historical map that shows Malcolm X’s life.
I am seriously planning to purchase the Kindle book Manning Marable’s new bio of him as soon as I am ready for a new book.

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keep thinking I should read the Hunger Games novels of Suzanne Collins. Unfortunately when I read excerpts I am not drawn in. The prose style is precious to me (there’s a cat named Buttercup in the first few pates). Plus if I understand the plot, it’s basically a rip off and “young adulterizing” of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” with a dash of Mad Max and Robin Hood in it. It’s quite reasonable as a Kindle book but I just can’t bring myself to buy it and read it. There are zillion people in line for it at the library. Sheesh.
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Post Script —- My website went away today for several hours. When it returned it seemed to be missing several days of blogs. Weird.

jupiterjenkins.com

musician, reader and long time internetter

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