Today was a really good day. I had the opportunity to spend the day with an old college friend--the person who is probably responsible for getting me started on a songwriting path.
To compare our relative musical knowledge/skill--while I doubt he can remember not understanding advanced music theory, I made it through second year theory by trial and error--never did quite understand it.
And he wrote music. All the time. It sort of just ran out of the ends of his fingers. Choral works, cantatas, songs that modulated in all kinds of strange patterns with melodies that were sometimes impossible for me to sing. He's a fan of tritones. I can't sing tritones (unless I cheat--sneak up on it, as in "Bali Hai". My voice insists on resolving to the 4th or the 5th.
Anyway, I had old pieces of his music, things he wrote in college, that I suspected he had lost track of, so I took them with me. He was amazed I still had them. He didn't even remember writing all of them. One of them he was even sure I had written!
I think it's been seven years since I've seen him, so this was a real treat. He hasn't been writing any music these days. Except he did just write a piece for voice, cello, and violin. Or maybe it was voice, cello, and piano. I forgot already, and I just saw it performed Saturday at his mother's memorial service (which is why he was Minnesota).
So, enough blathering from me tonight. It's been a good day.
