I have debated about blogging about “Your Beauty,” the art song I’m struggling with for John Tibbetts, but I think I will.

I’ve spent about ten days whacking around notes in my music notebook, which is unusual for me.  I usually open a Finale file and play around there. In fact, I have a Finale file already created called “tibbetts abortive attempts,” and it’s got some real dead ends in it.

But I thought I would force myself to play on paper/keyboard instead of the screen, in the hopes that it would broaden my abilities to hear the music in my head and get it into the Real World more easily.

Amazingly, it did not.  I got three pages of scribblings, none of which seemed inspired to me, and so this morning I thought I would input some of it into Finale to see what it sounded like if it weren’t being stumbled over by my fingers.  It wasn’t excellent.

So I just noodled about a bit, and lo! there was the opening.  Simple, yearning, with potential for more.  We’re going to push on from there, and I don’t know how much I’m going to go back to the notebook as a tool.  It doesn’t seem to work for me.

Here are the first 21 measures of “Your Beauty”: mp3

Remember, the last part of anything that I put up while I’m working on it sucks.