Behind The Music - L.C. (Piano Meditation No. 1 in Am)
Photo by Catalin Sandru on Unsplash
In the Summer of 2008 my sister got married and I had written the music for her to walk down the aisle by. After the ceremony my father’s friend came up to me and complimented the music and as she did she jokingly said that she would like a song written for her. I said that I would but never really attended to the promise. At the time I was in college and working so my time was extremely crunched, but I kept it in the back of my mind throughout the next year.
The Winter of 2009 brought with it sad news: Linda had cancer. When I found this out I locked myself in a practice room in the UW-Milwaukee music building. The piano and I were not friends that night. My piano skills are remedial at best and in total frustration at my inability, and total lack of ideas, I dropped my forehead onto the center of the keyboard. My right foot happened to be holding down the sustain pedal when I did this. The tones I was hearing and how they worked simultaneously with and against each other was a break through moment. In my excitement I played around with the idea and expanded upon it.
Had the practice rooms had any windows on the doors someone passing by would have been very confused by what they were seeing. Because my skills were so bad, and my excitement so high, I was continuing to bounce my head on the keyboard with my arms outstretched to various parts of the keyboard. This was the way I ended up generating a majority of the ideas for the song. It was only later when my head began to hurt that I stuck my fingers where my head was landing to find out which notes were being played.
I was wrapping up my degree program in the Spring and Summer of that year so my time was again very limited and the notes from the original writing session were tucked away in a folder which had become buried in other papers. These folders and papers where all but lost when I moved from Milwaukee back to Minneapolis that June. Almost a year later, from when I moved back, in the early Spring 2010, I got a phone call from my father that Linda’s cancer was back and it didn’t look good. He mentioned that she had said something about the song that I had promised and that I should get it done quickly.
I unburied the folder containing the sketches from the night in 2009 and started playing them over to try to get back into the headspace I was in when I wrote it. At this point, however, it was impossible to get there because the time that had lapsed and the overall mood of the situation had given me perspective on the situation. Sometimes with songwriting you are unable to complete a song until you have a story or the perspective on the situation to be able to use as the thread that weaves all of the random ideas into one solid statement. When I had originally written the ideas it was on a strictly “that sounds cool” basis. While this is typically the starting point for a good majority of songs it is not enough to finish a song, or at least finish a song that is supposed to make a statement.
While it is tempting to write something typically grandiose about how “I meant the repeating structures of the minor seventh suspended chords to mimic that ticking of a clock” it’s not true. I truly dislike when composers or songwriters, or any artist in general, do this because it is completely self inflating and takes away from a listener’s ability to make the work personal to them. Ultimately, the repeating chord in the beginning is where my head was hitting the keyboard. This is a moment of how grossly uncool the songwriting process can be. I did, however, mean to keep the repeating chord to create an atmosphere where one could reflect. The idea of it being a meditation meant that the music should work with the way the mind reflects and draws on memories, not call attention to itself. The structure was based on the idea of looking back on one’s life after finding out that your story will be ending soon. The speed of the passages are meant to reflect the speed of which different portions of our lives go by. Aside from that there were no grand schemes or techniques that I was attempting to use while writing. Even if there were, to any non-musician the description would be lost and the aforementioned personalization for the listener would be destroyed.
After I had come up the structure of the song and the general idea for it I wrote the piece one hand at a time. A good majority of the piece was notating it away from the piano and then seeing if I liked how that part sounded. The only trouble with this, and my lack of skill at the piano is to blame, was that I had no idea what the parts sounded like when played together. But I knew I had to get this song written and recorded quickly because Linda’s time was growing ever shorter.
Over the course of the ten or so months that I had been back in the Twin Cities area I had been working to re-establish my connections to the music scene in the area. A good friend of mine had introduced me to a guy by the name of Matt Curney who at that time was playing in a piano-driven pop band by the same name. I had only met Matt a few times, but he was the only piano player that I knew so I called him and asked him to do me a huge favor and record this song. The problem with it was that I had promised the song in a little under a week’s time so he and I agreed to meet at the McNally Smith Music School in St. Paul to use the keyboards in the classrooms.
At McNally, in one of the classrooms, I set up my equipment that I use at home and we started to record. The only trouble was that halfway through the second take an ensemble came in and we had to move because their class was about to begin. We quickly packed up and moved to the room next door. After the first take in that room another ensemble came in we moved again to the room next door. This happened yet again and we continued our room-to-room march down the hall. In the final room we were able to record the fourth, fifth and final takes of the song.
Aside from the room difficulty there was one unique challenge that I had not foreseen having with the piece. Because of my ignorance of how to properly play the instrument I had kept my foot down on the sustain pedal for the entire piece and had written this into the score. This is completely counterintuitive for the trained pianist and Matt would constantly raise his foot and kill the way the pitches would ring against one another. The way we worked our way around this was to have me hold down the sustain pedal while simultaneously do the recording. This doesn’t sound so bad but my computer and gear was four or five feet away so I was stretched out like a Mr. Bean skit.
I went to Linda’s house and played it for her and her family. It was a weird, but rewarding experience because typically you write a song about someone and they don’t know about it or they listen to it without you. When the song finished she asked me at what point of the funeral did I imagine it being played. I was taken aback and said that I had only wished to fulfill my promise to write her a song and that any decision to use it was strictly up to her.
A week or so later the song was used during the remembrance section of her funeral.
