Composition

It is older than the code: composition started in 2009, and it is the activity picked up again most often since.

The trigger was curiosity: the Pizzicato software, a gift for an eighth birthday. A few notes written, listened to, changed, listened to again, a loop that never stopped. What keeps it going has not changed: hearing one’s own creation, and recognising one’s own emotions in it.

Composing is saying what words cannot quite put down. A sometimes indescribable emotion becomes music that speaks without barrier, and lightens by turning it, even the darkest, into something sincere.

Classical music, in a frankly romantic idiom. The kinship is with Beethoven, Chopin and Rachmaninov, not with what is written today. It is simply the idiom that speaks the most. Most pieces are for solo piano; others, more rarely, for small orchestra or chamber ensemble.

The three periods on the site also follow an evolution in the writing. From 2009 to 2013, learning on the family computer, in Pizzicato, mostly blind. In 2013, a personal computer marked a real restart: more constructed writing, less improvised. In 2016, another change of machine, on Linux, brought the move to MuseScore. Almost everything written since the beginning was eventually found and gathered; those three periods remain useful landmarks.

The state of the catalogue is very uneven, and it is better described as three piles than as a single number. About ten pieces are finished to the point of being showable. Many others are almost finished, which is to say not presentable: they are missing the ending, a transition, or a passage left approximate. Behind them, a hundred or so sketches that may never come to anything.

Since the piano returned home, almost everything is written at the keyboard rather than with a pen, and the hand finds things the head would not have looked for.

Almost every piece has its story. Prélude no. 1, written in January 2013, owes a lot to the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata, played at a family funeral in 2009: much of what was written in that period served as much to break free of it as to transcribe it.

Two others, in very different genres. Essai 42 is written for a friend who played the clarinet, and the instrument imposed itself. Essai 73 came from a suggestion to write about Covid; the piece carries the lockdown as it was lived: a very fast tempo, a relentless, repetitive rhythm, with no apparent change.

A few pieces can be heard here, scrolling score included: the music page. The recordings are MuseScore renderings, not piano takes; a real recording will replace them without changing anything else in the chain.