This quote gets attributed to a dozen people, and the target city always changes (Gibraltar, Madrid, Rome, etc.), but I’ve heard it as the following:
Writing a novel is like walking from Vladivostok to Paris on your knees. You arrive in Paris exhausted to a brilliant champagne-and-caviar party where you celebrate and have a wonderful time … and you wake up the next morning in Vladivostok on your knees.
I think it will go for music as well. Time will tell.
I’ve never been to St. Petersburg. Why am I referring to the Bm piece I’m currently working on as “Twilight in Petrograd?” It has that sort of cold, snowy, darkened approaching-Autumn feel to it, seen from inside a very old building in a very old city, with a warm cup of whiskey-spiked coffee in one’s hand. It begs for the St. Petersburg reference.
And by the way, how did I wind up in B minor?
Did a little more work on it last night, and I seem to be writing it in a highly nonlinear fashion. The initial bit that I wrote slammed shut like a coffin lid at the end, so it was difficult to move forward from it. I pulled out the octaves to make it lighter and a bit easier to steer, and ended up with the possibility of going in two directions, both of which are lovely. I’ve ended up in AM again; it’s the D connection. The first piece was FM, which has D as a relative minor, and this one is in Bm, which has D as a relative major. If I want to execute brownian motion around D, I’m ending up in AM. Getting there by a lovely means, though. 
Bm -> GM -> E7 -> AM. It’s very similar to D -> Gm -> E7 -> AM from the first piece. I’ll have to watch out for that in the future; it’s a pretty modulation, but I don’t want it to “wear out its welcome.”
Viola has unfortunately been suffering because of my having been blindsided by my sudden discovery of an ability to write music in myself. I’ve been going over and over and over the various tricky bits in the Bach Minuet #2 from Suzuki v1. (Note: it’s all “tricky bits.”) I admit that it’s far more satisfying to sit down at the piano and noodle around and wind up with something nice that I’ve created myself than to pick up the viola and wind up with sore arms and squeaks. I have to just force myself to keep going knowing that understanding this instrument better will give me something to play that is portable and gorgeous, and that knowing it will also enable me to write for it better.
I sat down last night and decided to poke around in B minor. So I did. It’s not that hard, and there are formulas that can be used to approach something that make it fairly simple. Basic music theory stuff, but still very useful, and more than enough to write some very nice things in. The modern-classical-music types might sneer, but ignore them.
This is the toolchest you can rummage around in when playing in a given key: the relative major and minor, all the chords in that key signature, and the seventh chords that go into the relative major and minor. Chances are, unless you are writing some seriously bizarre abstract “music,” you will be using these chords.
It goes for minor keys, too. Suppose you decide to write something in Am. Let’s go through these steps for that:
Okay, now just noodle around with your right hand in Bm. Just poke around and try doing stepwise ups and down, pretty triplets that seem to work nicely to you or remind you of things you’ve heard before. You’ll find that certain sequences of keys feel good to you or sound more pleasing; this is where the convenience of having grown up listening to Western music for your whole life comes in. It’s one of the big reasons why, for your first few efforts, it’s also good to stick with the basic guidelines I’ve given above. More complex music can be intriguing and fun to write and listen to, but major/minor scale music in regular time signatures is the musical mother tongue of just about everyone in the West. If you can hum “Doe a Deer” to yourself, your ear already “thinks” in these terms.
In short: you know this stuff already. You just don’t know you know it. The vast majority of the music you’ve heard, popular especially, is written in a nice easy major key, and uses the seventh-chord-to-tonic resolution an awful lot. As you poke around and just let yourself find a melody, try putting chords to it. Don’t get fancy, just hit block chords one per beat. You’ll find that, after a lifetime of listening to Western music, your ear will “know” which chord goes with which note in the melody. If you are in CM and you end up with a long pause on an F, you’ll find that the FM chord will work nicely. If you want to go into the minor — A in this case, that B immediately beforehand will slide right into an E7 hand-in-glove.
Now, you can write any time signature you want — meaning you can mess around to any beat you like. But for a start, try something that’s 3/4 or 6/8, something dancelike with a nice easygoing rhythm that you can catch easily. That will make it easier for you. Don’t be afraid to just poke aimlessly, or play the same thing a few dozen times to see where your ear wants to go next.
Then … write it down. For me, I’m pondering using Lilypond for one reason: it’s free. It’s fiddly, but I write webpages in native HTML and have never used a WYSIWYG interface in my life, so I’m not only content to manipulate text files but actually happier to do that than otherwise since it lets me “see under the hood” more.
I think I’m getting more of it. I can scrape my way through all of the Bach Minuet #2, but I think I’ve gotten some good stuff out of the first theme (I think it’s about two bars) before it wanders off into Em. It’s really interesting to think of a sort of two-dimensional planar view of the interval spacings, and the whole “walking” idea of allowing your fingers to think ahead.
My thumb is still not curved as I’d like it to be, and I have to keep in mind how I want it to be so that I don’t end up with it cramping up on me … but my bow hold has gotten a bit more flexible and active. One doesn’t appear to draw the bow over the strings so much as put the thing there and move it back and forth directly. It’s hard to explain, but I do feel that it’s settling out.
After more than a little bit of work on the first few non-Suzuki pieces (well, they’re in the book, but written by Bach), I can say that I’ve got some work to do on the “walking fingers” business that the practice tips indicate is a major part of learning Minuet #2. I’m also bit by bit refining how I approach half-steps near the scroll, like B-C on the A string. Putting my hand sideways as much as possible doesn’t do it, and I’m trying to keep in mind the concept of “stacking” my fingertips on top of one another. Long-story-short, the A string is a serious challenge, probably more so than the C.
In good news, I think I’ve sussed out more of the bow hold, but I have to straighten my thumb out for the moment in order to do it — it enables me to keep my knuckle flat and use the center two fingers in my bow hand as a sort of “fulcrum” while effectively steering with the index finger and pinky and holding lightly with a minimum of bounce on the down bows. I’ll go with it for now, but keep curving the thumb in the back of my mind.
It’s all nontrivial, and I can’t fathom ever picking up this instrument and feeling at home with it, beautiful as it is when played by someone who knows what they are doing. This is a long-haul instrument, like a language. I’m still getting used to the whole idea that it will, when not handled with exquisite precision, make some very unmusical noises.
So basically, what’s going on is that I am in the first two little pieces by Bach on this thing. I tend to work them out on the piano first, including accomp so that I know what keys I’m modulating to. I then sit and think a bit about the fingering, and pick up the viola after that. I fumble my way through one bar at a time, feeling my arms getting tired in the process. *sigh* I just need to do one bar at a time and add them together as I go, paying special attention to the practice tips in the back of the book.
I feel like a jack russell terrier latched onto a knotted towel. Now that I’m actually writing music on the piano, with the potential for more to come, cutting into piano time for the viola will become even more challenging. Where’s that winning lottery ticket when you need one?
It’s cheesy and rather simple, but it’s the first thing I’ve ever done. One of the fundamental truths about myself that I always knew was that I “can’t write music.” I had “tried.” It was just something I couldn’t do, as characteristic of me as the color of my hair or my height.
Gabriela’s Smile (PDF)
Like I’ve said, it’s nothing much at all, and fairly short. Not technically demanding, and more just me playing around with chord progressions. But if it hadn’t been for her, I wouldn’t have even done that much. Hopefully, in the future, more and better ideas will surface.
Milward Violas — lovely looking instruments, interesting articles
It’s annoying how persistent some problems are — the fact that I’m having a devil of a time flattening my knuckles as I hold my bow, and that the tip of the bow is still wandering off behind my head long after I thought I’d solved that problem. I would have hoped that by now, I’d have recognized what “felt” wrong enough not to do it anymore. *sigh* This is a very unforgiving instrument, and ridiculously sensitive. Pianos are not nearly that sensitive to the body of the user; one doesn’t even hold them, after all. The musician sits at it, like a machine operator, which is what we are. One can of course damage one’s hands by playing incorrectly, but it’s not like the thing will start scraping if you absent-mindedly cross your ankles while playing or sit a bit tilted to one side, either.
With violas (and presumably all stringed instruments), the damn things are hypersensitive even to small changes in grip, posture, or tension. The entire body becomes the instrument when one picks up a viola. I don’t know how singers stand it.
So, from last night:
1) Relax near the end of the bow stroke or when changing direction with the bow. Don’t tense up, or else the thing will scratch.
2) Keep the knuckles flat.
3) Make sure the tip of the bow isn’t wandering off of straight. Bow straight.
I’ve heard my instructor say these things a dozen times. One day, maybe I might actually start doing them. 
Single-octave scales, four notes to a bow were a significant chunk of my weekend, along with futzing around with “Dove sei?” in D and “Lights,” also in D (only the first themes of both). The former was written in E but is usually performed on a Baroque A, and hence a bit sharp relative to an Eb; as a result, I don’t feel too strange putting it in D. The latter was written in D; much of their music was written in the less remote sharped keys like G, D, A, and E — bless them for it.
The single octave scales were all open-string scales and the other ones one whole step up from the open strings (D, A, and E). Bow speed is a big part of doing 4/bow scales, or else one will “run out of bow” when the direction of bowing reverses.
Issues are that my string crossings are somewhat extravagant. I can feel the ground move when I do them, and have got to think smooth thoughts, of not disturbing the surface of a glass of water or that sort of thing. Otherwise, my string crossings or changes in bow directions will register seismically.
I also need to make notes on post-its and put them on the pieces I’m practicing or at least on the pages of the Suzuki book that I’m open to at any moment to keep awareness of things in the front of my mind, things like, “smoother string crossings, don’t jolt things” and “watch bow speed for 4/bow scales.”
Next after the string crossings/bow reversals become smoother and I get used to one-octave 4/bow scales will be the lowest two-octave scales starting on the C string (C, D, E).
“For 37 years I’ve practiced 14 hours a day, and now they call me a genius!”
Pablo de Sarasate (Spanish Violinist and Composer. 1844-1908)
You know how “they” say that playing scales helps you play in tune?
Playing scales helps you play in tune, and more thoughtlessly because you’ve trained your hands and brain to put your fingers down in the right relationships to one another.
Besides, they’re fun. I do a lot of handwork, so I’m used to making the same movements with my fingers six million times and calling it a hobby. This is not substantially different except it’s probably more annoying for my neighbors. (I use the mute.)
