Writing from Scratch:

I have a major peeve when wanting to work with or compose music. I can’t have a television on within earshot. These days the television advertising stream is interrupted at spasmodic times with programming. The advertising stream most always has some form of music in background or clubbing you over the head. Our music genius and music dregs are being paid well by advertising. I’m jealous and hope they haven’t completely sold out their art. But they assault our psyche continually. Life is not an advertising oratorio, so silence is more than golden, and most often necessary.

Some of you, like myself, understand computer programming concepts and structure. Some may have areas of genius, and others, may be genius in their overall clarity of vision and scheming to complete goals. Most all of us in the forum, understand music composition concepts and structure. Many of us

will find a certain type of genius in special facets of music while a few may have an overall clarity of vision and developed technique to accomplish some artistic feats. I don’t see myself as any kind of genius, yet I will on occasion have a little epiphany. I’ve experienced putting together musical ideas and played them back and amazed myself. If you work at composition for even a brief length of time, the time will come when your mind will quietly ask you, "Did I write that?"

Of course, you didn’t. The great fear of all writers and composers who value their work is creating something only to find someone else did it and published it.

"If I have seen farther than others it was because I was standing on the shoulders of giants" – Sir Isaac Newton –

No, you didn’t write that clever melody that fit the mood and atmosphere you wanted. Many wrote it, with you, helping you put it together. So, you can put it together with your name on it, and call it your creation, but you know how you got there by way of giants you may not have seen or studied.

My case in point: I was directing a small church choir. They had decided to sing an old Christmas cantata from several years back, and I worked on it with them. It was lovely, and not bad for a very small choir. It was flawed in my view, and I grumbled a little that Joseph always got the raw end of the story when he went through a lot of grief. Someone told me to put my music where my mouth was or let it go.

I’d written some kind of planesongy-type tunes to impress a girl one time. I knew I needed more structure with a tempo and to fit in with the other music I should have some kind of lead-in. I was very green at this.

The curse of all time, television, infected my brain with a Fischer-Price commercial for Christmas toys. It was syncopated glee, and not the mood I needed. Joseph was completely stressed, and he was being pulled one way, then another. If I took about the first eight bars of Fischer-Price and leveled out the syncopation to a more fluid and slower legatto, it had Joseph’s pending stress. One you find a melody, you have chords, counter-melodies and whole new melody structures that look not-at-all like the Fischer-Price pitch to sell toys in whoopy land. Thus, that Christmas, I auditioned "Shall I Conceal What Love has Done ?" The rest is not history, but it was the end of the beginning.

If you recognize Fischer-Price, it's not identical, yet from this meandering lead-in I heard my ideas for the rest of the work.
This in not (yet) in karaoke form.





<center><table border=1><tr><td>Shall I Conceal What Love Has Done? from Joseph and Family by Michael Dodson
Shall_I_Conceal_What_Love_Has_Done.mid (18.0 k)</td></tr></table></center>

"Shall I conceal what love has done, what love has done for me?
Betroathed am I with loving heart, and what does my heart see?
Can grain be gathered from a field where seed has never been?
Shall Mary's lif be cursed to scorn in evil eyes of men?
A cousin or a loving friend could hide my love away.
And on what truth would my son stand beneath the light of day?
O' Father, God of Abraham,
My God of David, too,
In ancient times you showed the way,
What shall my poor flesh do?"