What I'm Up To

Is something I've no business being up to.

I've never taken a music composition class. I had a few music theory tutorials as a supplement to my violin lessons twenty years ago, but nothing graded, nothing formal. Nothing where I had to submit work to be critiqued and corrected.

But here I am, with my Second Annual Christmas carol poem finally completed, trying to write the music for it. In four-part harmony. Or polyphony, since I'm going for a medieval feel.

Last year's carol I set it to a Welsh folk tune. This year, oh yeah, I gotta do it myself.

The soprano and alto lines are easy. I can plunk them out on my piano. The bass and tenor, not so much.

Doesn't help that it's freezing cold in my music room. Doesn't help that I never had the advantage of piano lessons, either.

And it doesn't help that in a better-case scenario this would have been done and sent out with my Christmas cards three weeks ago.

Well, I had other things to take care of. And the lyrics hadn't come through yet, anyway.

About forty minutes ago I gave up composing on the piano for the night and came upstairs to copy the soprano and alto lines, at least, into the freebie music composition program on my computer. But I can't remember how to make it let me do passing tones. Which not only makes the playback sound funny, it makes it hard to keep track of where I am in my manuscript.

Which might be a clue that it's time to give over for the night and take up the cause again in the morning?