A Way Back

For about four years in my early forties, I composed dozens of songs on my computer. What began as simple pop tunes quickly evolved into symphonic pieces. While I did have a rudimentary understanding of music theory, most of what I had to learn to compose the more complex pieces, I learned not from a book or a class, but from trial and error. As I look back at that time I am still surprised at how quickly an unschooled fellow like me went from composing for two instruments to fifteen instruments, a progression I attribute primarily to one factor: I never criticized myself. I mention this because this was the polar opposite of the approach that I took for my writing. There I survived on a steady diet of self-criticism, which I felt served to keep me on the straight and narrow. Yet never – and I mean absolutely never – was it so with the music. I was just thrilled I could do it. I had dreamed all my life of being able to write symphonic music, and now I was.

At first, my wife, with whom I would share every song or sonata, felt the same way. “Wow,” she’d say. “That is so cool that you wrote that.” By and by, however, she got used the fact that I was writing music, and her responses changed. One day, after I played a new piece for her, she shrugged and commented, “That one really doesn’t come together.” Had she said this about a story I’d written, I’d have been furious or depressed. Yet with this sonata, I realized I didn’t actually care what she thought about it. I knew I’d learned something writing it, and that hadn’t changed because she couldn’t get into it.

This was an experience at once wholly foreign and intimately familiar. In the past, when opinions about something I had made arrived at my doorstep, I was used to viewing these messages as a command to head out in search of some treasure that would please everyone. Yet in this instance, I stayed home. That, after all, is where the music was being written and where all the pleasure I’d gained from it was known.

As an artist, I am still disoriented from time to time by this relationship between home and the world outside my door. What I create in here is meant to travel out there. I, however, am meant to stay home. It is tempting to try to follow those stories to ensure their safe travel, but I lose sight of them the moment I cross my threshold, and am left instead to search for a way back to where I belong.