"Fine" ... that feels good
I've been working on a piece for a while ... it's close to being done and you'll see it showing up here in a couple more days ... but today I just had the very nice experience of suddenly realizing, "the symbol that I need to be reaching for, right here, is the end-bar."
In the Italian: Finé. "Here is the end."
Oh, of course, I might change my mind and add a little more here and there, but I now find myself briefly just sitting here, just musing a little bit: that the end of a piece is every bit as important as the beginning. Yet, somehow, it doesn't always receive the same amount of attention when we're writing. A musical piece, perhaps more than all other types of creative writing, very badly needs "a beginning, a middle, and an end." The end needs to be logical, satisfying, perhaps a little unexpected (perhaps not). Making the listener want neither more nor less. The plates are coming back to the kitchen clean, and there's satisfied conversation springing up in the dining room.
Except: isn't it fun to find yourself absent-mindedly whistling your own tune? Not because you're trying to work out some problem with it or to come up with some new ideas, but just because you enjoy it.
And isn't it even more fun when someone over-hears you doing it, and it catches their ear, and they smile and ask (not knowing the answer), "Who wrote that?"
:-)
Yeah... this "writing music thing" is probably the most all-around satisfying thing that I know anything about. Even if it should be "just for my own pleasure," it is pleasure, indeed.
Comments
I've composed a few pieces, most all for high school/middle school concert band (I'm a public school band director). The funny thing for me is, when I write something, especially something really "catchy" that sticks in my brain like you're describing, I keep having this fear that I didn't write it. That it's something I've heard in the past, and I'm only *thinking* I came up with it!
In reply to Funny Thing Is... by newsome
I had a similar thing happen but in reverse. I'd had a folk tune buzzing around in my mind head for a few days and decided to write it down an arrangement. Then I showed/played it to a friend who's a serious folk musician to find out the title of the song. He said he'd never heard the tune before. I got the same response from everyone I asked about it. So, I assume it's original. But, as you say, I still have a nagging doubt that it IS something I've heard somewhere or that it was originally a well-known tune that I've simply misremembered so nobody recognises it
In reply to I had a similar thing happen by fatwarry
That reminds me of the story of The Beatles song Yesterday. Paul McCartney woke up one morning after having had the song play in his head all night during a dream. He rushed to the piano and wrote it down, but for awhile he was convinced that it was a song he had heard before. According to the Wikipedia article about the song, he played it for people in the music industry for a month before finally deciding that it was his.
Mine went the OTHER way. I wrote an "original" 24 or so measure funky blues lick for my marching band to play in the stands. I played it for a band director buddy of mine, and he said "that's Night Train. There's a couple of notes difference, but that's what it is." And he was right. I took it up from the kids, trashed it, and never played it again out of embarrassment that I had written a slightly modified version of a famous jazz piece without even realizing it.
That's been about 12 years ago, and I guess it's part of the reason I still have that fear today when I compose something!
In reply to Yesterday by newsome
There's a melody search engine called Musipedia that's pretty useful for identifying tunes
//www.musipedia.org
Also, the copyright office (in the US) expressly states that "chord progressions cannot be copyrighted." And so on. I've written a ring-tone (for myself) that, as another person pointed out, rather closely resembles a tune used in Dr. Zhivago. And yet, it isn't that tune exactly.
It is reasonable to put a song through a "similarity search" engine before making a big effort at publishing the thing commercially, just to provide yourself with grounds for an "innocent infringement" defense should you need one. (Publishers do this routinely, to protect themselves.) But, let's face it, there are only so many notes and only so many ways to combine them.
The probability is effectively zero that, for anything you have ever written, someone else out there has not done something similar, especially if you focus upon a small-enough fragment of the work. (Is the first measure of the "Ditty" that I just posted similar to something else that's already out there? No doubt. Is it therefore "copied from" or "stolen from" some other work? Emphatically not.) "Similarity" does not equate to "infringement."
INAL, but one thing that a lawyer friend of mine once told me is this: keep a lab-notebook. In other words, a running-log or journal. Keep all of your intermediate drafts, and keep a time-and-dated record of each time you worked on the piece. Just commentary, making sure that everything clearly ties together. If someone later challenges you that what you did was not, in fact, an original work but rather an infringing work ... here is the basis of your defense. "Here is what it became, and here is step-by-step how it came to be, and here is what I was saying to myself at the time." Very likely it will show that infringement did not occur; otherwise, that the infringement that did occur was "innocent." It's extremely unlikely to happen, but if it ever did, you have your ducks in a row and it is immediately obvious to anyone who must be judging the case (and to the plaintiff's attorney, in advance...) that you have done so.