sabine ganezer linfield dept. of music senior capstone presentation
Reflection
The first draft of this song might have been the catalyst for my decision to venture into the strange territory of songwriting for my senior project. In Spring 2018, I wrote the verse and chorus parts for an assignment whose main parameter was to be in the key of G Major. When I came to class, I was too embarrassed to sing my own song or attempt to bumble along on the piano, so the instructor Dr. Reinkemeyer played the piano part I'd written while classmate Hannah Terrell sight-sang the vocal line. It was fascinating for me to see other human beings translating the sound I'd translated to symbols on the page back into sound, and although this rendition (understandably)
included a lot of stops and starts and fudging-throughs, I was happy that the class seemed to display a generally positive response to my rough draft. Hannah said it gave her the image of a character in a hypothetical musical theatre piece, a frustrated young composer, channeling her sense of social isolation and professional inadequacy into the chords she was banging out on the piano. This image was pretty accurate to the one I had of myself in the practice room when I had come up with the first draft of the piece a night or two earlier.
It was probably a dark and stormy night. But that's irrelevant. I was frustrated after a session of Instrumental Performance Seminar because I'd heard some other students discussing their evening plans to watch a film together and make popcorn. I watched them discuss how much fun they were going to have. There was a secret velleity deep inside me that it would somehow occur to them to invite me, but I was much too rigid and shy to join the conversation. So I just looked out from under my eyelid like a child peering out from under a tablecloth to check if the monsters were gone. Most of the people pointedly ignored my eyes; one person seemed to accidentally stumble into making eye contact and looked at me piercingly, a little guiltily. But no one invited me to spend the evening with them. I probably didn't look very approachable, with my tense body posture and defensive glare. I never expected to be invited and didn't think I would even enjoy the experience much -- socializing is a draining task for me; I probably wanted to get some homework done, and I don't even particularly like popcorn. But I liked those people -- or thought I did, from my self-imposed distance -- and I wished that, if they were to invite me, I would feel it was possible for me to say yes and actually go, instead of declining out of fear. In my fantasy world they would notice me, view me as an equal on some level, and maybe even want to take the gamble of including me in their conversation, to discover the usefulness and compassion for others that I knew I was capable of but which I felt I could not mobilize unless an interaction was initiated by someone else.
I retreated into a practice room with the general ambition to do some schoolwork. When the strange yet logical landscape of piano keys sprawled before my wanton fingers, I found myself pressing down keys at random.
No, not quite at random -- there was a preference for such combinations as G and A-flat, F and B-natural, C-sharp and the D a minor ninth above -- and hey, what happens if I put those all together in one startling chord? The resultant dissonance to my ears had an attitude just like the biting leftover winter wind that I viewed as an adversary or the giggling gaggles of girls who ignored me in the halls. But this time I was the one who owned that attitude of expressing a deep sassiness, a deep desire to inflict some emotional pain on others in order to deflect it from myself. I felt in control of the pain in a way that I normally didn't feel. I imagined the tritones flouncing upon the ears of everyone who (as I perceived) wanted to not listen to me, especially with the questionable intonation of the practice-room piano causing all those additional beating microtones, wobbling tension and release, strident shivering. This was the voice to my person-ness, my frustration at being left out and at leaving myself out, at being discounted and at discounting myself before I even tried to connect with others. This was the voice that could exit my body through my hands on the keys and materialize in the "real world." And there was that G Major songwriting assignment. I began to focus on F-sharp and C. The first few chains of words vomited themselves in graphite on paper almost naturally: "tritones are my best friends. No one else likes me, so I'm alone, free to play horrible sounds..."
The text didn't come out exactly as you hear it today, but it was pretty close. I seemed to be in a state of channeling the energy I wished I had used reaching out to other people, channeling it into rhymes and thoughts that just worked; it was one of the least-effort writing experiences I ever had, probably because it just came right from the heart of the intellect -- that is, I'd already articulated this feeling of isolation in internal-monologue prose numerous times, and it wanted to lace itself into rhymes perhaps to prove to someone else that I had something to say. I chose to study English because writing -- words on a page -- has always been the most surefire way for me to communicate my ideas, much easier than talking on the spot in real time. This songwriting assignment might have been the moment that gave me the opportunity to realize that writing a song that encompassed my ideas was like the best of both worlds, speaking and writing: I could plan exactly what was to be said ahead of time, but when it would reach the other people's ears it would do so in a dynamic, real-time way, as sound waves in air, music in meter, chords in a harmonic progression. It was fun.
I didn't have this song performed on the songwriting class open mic, because it turned out that I couldn't (or felt I couldn't) sing words that the audience would understand when those words were written by me and gave a window into my universal yet personal issues. Instead, I ended up performing two songs I wrote in French, "je crois en moi" and "la vie est une chanson d'amour." These songs also dealt with some emotional issues, but because the lyrics were in French I knew most of the audience would hear them abstractly as sound. This felt like a safer filter through which to communicate, for the time being. Though it's a bit outside the scope of this project, it's important for me to make a note here that the French language fascinates me lyrically as well; it is a wonderful playground for sound and jeux de mots (wordplay), holorhyme, et cetera. Someday I would like to spend more time with French songwriting, as well as studying the French art songs (such as Debussy's "Proses Lyriques," the topic of my term paper for Form and Analysis class.)
Songwriting class was the most thrilling thing I had done for a long time. It felt like I was engaging with other people, whether by playing the violin in their country-rock song or working with them on generating lyrics or singing background harmonies. Conducting a whole small ensemble of string players and piano for "la vie est une chanson d'amour" felt like a dangerous amount of power in my hands. And I definitely spilled some of that power onto the floor when I flubbed an entrance while conducting and singing that song at the open mic. But even though we had to stop, discuss and start again, even that performance felt like a kind of success to me. It was the first time I composed something pleasant to listen to and presented it to an audience; it was the first time I felt integrated into a musical ensemble belonging even when I was the one who made a mistake and tripped up everything. I was uncharacteristically not humiliated and hiding in a corner obsessing over my error during the after-concert reception. As a result, I got a chance to hear what other people had to say about my writing and my performance. One student, a senior in literature whose (real or imagined) disdain I had always dreaded in poetry class, was bubbling over: "It's like -- you're singing, but -- you also wrote the song, but -- you also wrote the music, but -- it's also in French -- and -- and --" She seemed genuinely excited about something I had done. And, being a codependent loner by nature, that gave me permission to get a little excited about it myself. Maybe I could be really good at this. Maybe I could speak this way and people would listen. Another composition student "was blown away" by my drafts -- even though they were far from perfect! These were the things that egged me on and perhaps eventually led to my decision to propose songwriting as the genre for my creative writing senior project, rather than fitting into the categories of poetry, fiction, nonfiction or drama. That was one of the scariest things I have done at Linfield -- stepping outside the lines -- perhaps yet another form of self-isolation from everyone else who "belonged" in one academic discipline or another (or so it seemed to me.) I credit the immensely supportive attitude of my songwriting classmates and other colleagues for helping to encourage me to take these risks, and for accepting my failures, when some things just didn't fall into place the way they looked on the page.
I kind of abandoned this song for a while. Over the summer of 2019, I watched a production of the musical Dear Evan Hansen (book by Steve Levenson; music/lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul), performed in Boston by a cast that was not the original Broadway cast but which did a marvelous job. The "pit" orchestra was elevated on the stage, overlooking the action like a tree. The bow motions of the string players, the intricate slangy whispers of the percussionist's sticks, the harmony that came from the grand piano and made lights change color on the characters onstage... I had to try to interact more with this language, this "musical theatre" thing I had always dismissed as "not for me" but which, I realized, was, like songwriting, a language that combined multiple mediums of expression to convey meaning. Literary devices, timbral and tonal shifts, plot twists and word painting, tempo changes and character arcs and clever rhyme schemes (but perhaps not clever enough.) The attic bedroom at my aunt's house was not all that comfortable anyway and I woke up around 3 am Boston time. I rummaged in my computer's memory until I found the old MuseScore 2 file titled "Songwriting Assignment G Major." I started changing things, bending gestures to my now slightly more evolved taste in music. I added a violin, a cello, and a second voice which I imagined as perhaps another character in the scene. I picked a key that was more pleasant for me to sing in. Over the next few weeks I continued editing the sheet music. Tritones lived again.
Again, this has been one of the more ambitious songs in my project, because it required me to actually work with other humans. Furthermore, the vocal melody is frankly too ambitious for a voice student at my very low caliber/experience level to perform correctly. There were many times when I wanted to chicken out instead of setting up rehearsals and recording sessions with these complicated beings called musicians; I spent many long hours in the studio recording and re-recording and re-recording the vocal line searching for that perfect take that (spoiler alert) never happened. I considered giving up on this song (or the whole project.) But I had occasional little sparks of encouragement that reminded me to keep going. Example: one morning shortly before Form and Analysis class started, my classmate Pedro Graterol asked me how the overall project was going. When I gave some nondescript answer, he didn't lose steam as I'd hoped. Rather, he (mis-)quoted cheerily: "Tritones are a girl's best friends, right?"
Sometimes they scare me to death. But I still love them. Kind of like people.