Distracted Composition

Sharing this makes me feel like a fraud.

To get my composing muscle back to work I've set myself what I thought was an easy task: put my fingers on the piano keyboard for 15 minutes a day and see what happens.

Even this can be a challenge. What is the barrier?

I'm still staying at my parents' house, and the piano I played relentlessly as a child is in the next room. Once upon a time I would play it for practice, and I would play it for pure fun. I would put whatever book I was reading at the time on the music stand and let my fingers pick out melodies as a soundtrack to whatever adventures were happening as I turned the pages.

Today I experimented with returning to this technique. A sort of distracted composition. I took my iPad with "Surreal," a biography of Gala Dalí and put it on the music stand and improvised on the upright piano for 20 minutes while the voice recorder app from my phone captured what I was playing. It took the pressure off and I discovered some interesting passages that I can transcribe tomorrow.

Reading seems to occupy the part of my brain that might otherwise be judging every note I play. For 20 minutes today I forgot that I was a fraud.