When I first moved to NY, I wrote all my music out by hand. I’d buy staff paper with the lines pre-drawn, and I’d fill in clefs, time signatures, key signatures, measures, notes, etc. This worked great, except that it was extremely time consuming, labor intensive, and my music notation was almost as bad as my handwriting, so even I had trouble reading it. Thankfully, at about the same time, affordable music notation programs were coming on the market and surprise surprise, I was an early adopter. These programs connected a PC or Mac to a keyboard using the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) and frankly, there were more than a few bugs in the system.
It was not uncommon for me to spend all day, playing music into the computer, reformatting, spacing it just right, and meticulously editing lyrics, only to have the program crash right before I took a break for dinner. Just like working in word processors of the time, I learned to save my work often, but unlike word processors, saving work was not necessarily an indication that I could actually retrieve my work later. The midi files would often become corrupted at which point, none of my work was salvageable.
The first few tens of times this happened, I was completely dejected. All of my time and effort was wasted. My brilliant compositions were lost forever, sacrificed to the fickle and wicked gods of MIDI. I cursed the software, the computer, the keyboard, and myself for being such a lazy composer. Mozart never had notation software, and he seemed to do okay. Every time this happened I would sulk for a while, have stiff drink or two, and start all over again the next day.
Over time I began to notice a pattern emerging. The work that took me all day to do the day before, only took half a day to complete the second time around, and in the process of recreating my earlier work, I invariably streamlined, simplified, and generally created something markedly better than I had done the day before. This was universal. I never once ended up with a worse piece of music having lost my original to MIDI corruption. Over time I came to relish in these opportunities. I would rock up to dinner with friends, beaming with satisfaction and when they asked why I was so happy, I’d say “I lost all the music I wrote today to corrupt MIDI files.” Needless to say, they thought I was nuts, but in my experience lost to corruption meant that I was going to create something even better the next day.Continue Reading Lessons from a Former Life #3