Reluctant Farewell to a Dear Heart
With the help of my encouraging husband, Reluctant Farewell to a Dear Heart was finally published and will soon be up and running through Amazon and other sites. Most of the pieces in this book came rushing into my heart and fingers from January 2010 though April 2010. I had never been inspired in quite this way. I was writing in the memory of my dear friend and mentor, James Smith, professor of guitar at USC. I was haunted by the notes that eventually found themselves onto these pages, and I can’t imagine that I’ll ever do another project like this again in my life. It was unusual that I could find the time that it takes to capture the inspiration that is so fleeting. Between patients and children and my mother, I don’t usually have such concentrated time to focus and create.
I look back over this past year…the inspiration, the writing, the aching over changes, but, most of all the editing…MORE editing…and MORE EDITING! Craig and I don’t usually work well together. It’s better if we work as a team…headed for the same goal, but separately. Side by side, I’m afraid we would strangle each other! In thinking about it, mostly this is how these compositions could finally be written down.
I would begin by roughly writing out the tab of each song. Some of them, like the title cut, were actually written in the truck on the way to or from Southern Baja. Writing in my journal, I drew the shaky lines for the strings as we bumped along the Mexican Highway 1. I was sitting there with my little Breedlove Passport guitar and chased by the music in my head that I would frantically write down and then practice enough to remember the timing. My family was so patient with the long hours of listening to the same measures again and again as my fingers sometime bumped around on the fretboard. At times I would have to hold off on writing down because of the motion sickness caused by focusing on the page during the ride. Once I could play it well enough, we would record the piece. Craig would take my tabs and listen, to develop the timing and we would decide on a key signature once the notes became obvious. The computer program was helpful because if you place the tab correctly and then cut and paste to the staff, above, the notation should be correct. But, it isn’t as easy as it sounds.There were many bugs in the programs we used. Originally, I began to transcribe my pieces into the computer. Thank God that my super hero Craig stepped in to save the day!
Craig is such a genius when it comes to computers, and without his help this project may not have been completed at all. Or at the very least, it would have taken years to finish on my own. I had tried using the software myself, and with my dyslexic way of seeing things it was exasperating. The lines on the computer screen seemed to float around, and trying to harness them with my cursor seemed impossible. Every 3 or 4 notes that I would place on a string would mysteriously move to another string right before my eyes. I spent hours trying to make this right and many tears. Javier de los Santos, a friend of mine had helped me with some of what I had written earlier that James had insisted I write down before January. But we didn’t have enough time to spend together to finish a project like this. I was fighting with computer details at the same moment that other pieces were fighting to be heard in my brain! When working with the computer program, I would then try to delete the one note that had landed in the wrong place and somehow delete an entire line of music and have to backtrack to figure out which notes I had lost! Left on my own, I’m certain that I would have NO hair now, and my family would have left me or placed me into some institution.
You might expect, as I did at first, that this process of my writing it out and then Craig placing it into the computer would be the end of it. But not a chance. The the edits began. I would have to proof every line, every note, every tab to notation copy. In the meantime, there were pieces of the pieces that I had polished and they had taken on a new life. They became more complete than the first versions. So, those changes needed to be made and that news had to be delivered gently to Craig. I was also continuing to write, and some of THOSE hand written tabs were actually lost after I thought I had given the finished versions to Craig! Each of these versions took many hours to write out, so you can imagine what a victory it was when Craig and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary a few weeks ago. Miracles DO happen!
He would print out his latest version of each and I would study and play them again and again to make changes and give it back to him. Sometimes the changes happened. Sometimes they mysteriously didn’t and I had to tip toe around that reality to then have the changes made, AGAIN! All the while, I have had many pieces floating in and out of my head and heart that I couldn’t find the moments to capture at all.
When the pieces were nearly finished, I met with Javier Calderon, Bolivian guitarist who studied with Segovia for many years. Javier is now a professor at University of Wisconsin in Madison. I played the pieces for him and asked for his suggestions on my manuscript. His first thought was to fingering and positioning. THAT began an entirely new stage of editing. The program we were using wasn’t set up for much of that. So, I carefully wrote out the fingering on each piece and Craig began placing what I wrote onto the manuscript. He had to create the string fingering symbols with the number in the circles becasue there were none in the program.
Javier THEN mentioned that I had to record each song so the players would have something to listen to. So they would know what each should song like. I had known that all along. But had put it to the back of my brain. I couldn’t sell a book of new original pieces without guitarists hearing them and falling in love with them. So, the long hours of practice and recording began. It’s said that you need to play a piece 1200 times before it becomes proficient. **sigh** I found that to be true…and I STILL had to have some audio cuts to be sure the strings sang as well as I could make them. Of course, NOW, I’ve played them more and so when I hear the recordings I still hear everything that I’d like to perfect!!! ugh Thank you to Javier Calderon for his pushy encouragement. :o)
Craig is used to being the most perfect person in the room. So, working together on this was a personal challenge for both of us. Finding a way to ask for corrections while still knowing the understanding that I couldn’t do it without his help was vexing. I found myself wishing I could do it, alone. But, honestly I couldn’t have. This project brought us closer together and may have sealed our marriage after nearly 10 years of our life which is often so independent. It was a gift from God to remember James, but also for many other reasons.
I so hope that people will begin to play my pieces and will love them for years to come. Some day I’ll be able to play them myself with James and Fernando Sor and Segovia! Wonder if I’ll need the written music for that…hmmmm