So, I grew up writing most of my music on a computer. I began my music journey in church singing hymns (poorly) from a hymnbook, and then I joined my elementary school’s orchestra program playing violin (also relatively poorly) soon after I realized I enjoyed hearing music being read live. Something about the freedom of interpreting what’s on the page just interested my brain, I guess. And yeah, I’m of a generation where personal home computers were “a thing,” and I got access to my first music notation software, Music Masterworks I think, some time in fall 2002. Before that, I had scratched some notes on music staff paper, but nothing really “clicked” for me until I had the ability to almost instantly hear any music composition idea I could think of thanks to this music notation software and home PC.
Fast forward to today. (Is that too cliche? I’m not claiming to be a good writer here.) I continue to write music and play guitar in a number of projects. Like many composers of music, I’ve collected, well, a collection of works in various states of completeness. Some works are hidden treasures I’ve been saving for the right time to do something with… other compositions are, um, there for posterity, I suppose. I’ve written some odd and questionably listenable music over the years. It can be difficult to remove my bias from the lens through which I view my works, but you know. It can also be handy to have a somewhat neutral way to collect and organize my stuff.
How about cataloguing my compositions? That makes sense I think. Right? Kind of like how J. S. Bach’s works are catalogued one way with BWV (Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis) numbers. In a nutshell, that catalogue organizes Bach’s works by genre, and it doesn’t necessarily follow any chronological order. That could kind of work for me. Early on, I arbitrarily placed compositions in genre folders: Rock, Classical, Folk, Jazz/Blues, and Misc. I guess that’s all I was interested in or got around to in terms of thinking of music genres. Obviously (or maybe not), the BWV genres refer to a different type of music classification than what I used, but it’s an interesting (or maybe not) parallel to me.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s famous catalogue (the Köchel catalogue) uses K. numbers and tries to follow a chronological numbering system that follows when the works were composed. I can imagine that this would have been a pain to compile, since it can be difficult to trace when a composition was composed exactly. And sure enough, there are a number of revisions to the original numbering system, since, you know, research can advance over time. So any time a researcher discovers an authentic Mozart composition from any time other than the end of his life, the entire sequence of K. numbers has to be revised to squeeze in the new work. Not a very flexible system, but I suppose it gets the job done.
So yeah, since I am not a particularly big fan of the original “genres” I laid out early on in my music compositioning, I’ll probably go more with a K.-style numbering system rather than a BWV-style system. I realize that if I find a work ends up going in between two already-numbered works (not unlikely to happen), I’ll have to compromise or revise everything, but I think I’ll be able to figure out improvements as I go along. I am sure there are better systems, but I am too indoctrinated with music school information to have room for them right now. I would love to learn more one day though. It would be poignantly self-deprecating to realize years later, after I have catalogued all my old compositions chronologically by date of guessed compositional completeness, I realize that there is a better, faster, more convenient way to do the very thing I’d like to do, and that all my work was really pointless toiling; well, haha, that’s too bad for me!
Anyway, one thing I started doing is checking the “date created” metadata tag on my original midi compositions. Yes, my first music notation software saved everything in standard midi format files. Very forward-thinking in terms of data preservation, if I do say so myself. My first composition was entitled ‘Lectricky Jam and features what I’ll call the “kid’s first music canon” trope where the entire piece of music reduces down to 1 bar of original music written across about a half-dozen or more parts that enter one by one until the entire ensemble is jamming out to that one, repeating bar of music. Then, depending on the skills of the “kid’s first music canon” composer, various parts come in and out of playing to expose the various layers of the individual parts and how they interact with each other. Clearly, this is me remembering the best day in elementary school music class all semester: the day we get to play the xylophones that sit all year in the music classroom, being off-limits 99% percent of the time, and when you do get to play the xylophones, each player must carefully repeat their 1 bar of music that the teacher shows them, and then, as the teacher wraps up showing everyone their parts, they gesture to various players to play quieter or stop playing, or to come back in, and eventually everyone is instructed to stop. It’s Philip Glass meets Steve Reich for 10 year olds.
So yeah, not going to toot my own horn too much proving that I was a totally gifted, brilliant, big-brained musical prodigy, but you know. Music education is cool. Music notation software is cool. Remembering good times and great oldies is cool too. So, in conclusion, I’m aiming to start cataloguing my own music compositions… for fun. It might be incomplete, wrong, confusing, but, it’s my incomplete, wrong, and confusing music, gosh darn it, and I get some enjoyment out of being able to access it from time to time. I might update about it here if there is actually anything interesting to be gained… but yeah.
That’s pretty much all I wanted to say. Thanks for reading!
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