Music from the ether
As you may know, I took off the month of January for another of my “musical sabbaticals.”
I love to play the piano and compose music, but I can never find enough time to do either when I’m working. Fortunately, I’ve managed to carve out a few weeks in each of the past three years to focus on my hobby (and, I hope, my future retirement gig).
I never know where my inspiration will come from, but this time — in a first for me — I awoke one morning with a song in my head that I didn’t recognize. I immediately jotted it down and started asking people, “Have you heard this before?”
That’s important, I find, because we all go around with songs in our heads (especially those darn earworms). And a composer really might not know if his “creations” are original or simply dredged up from an attenuated memory. It’s an occupational hazard.
Eventually, I decided I must have come up with the melody myself and went to work turning it into a piano piece. But there’s more to the story. In fact, there’s something a bit spooky, in my opinion.
The song in my head was only the first few bars of something; not an entire number. So, I played around with it on the piano, as I always do when I compose, until I came up with some additional measures that seemed to flow well from the first ones and serve as a nice counterpoint.
During the weeks I worked on the piece, I played it for different groups of friends (fellow amateur pianists, for the most part) and always asked the same thing: Have you heard this song before? I was always assured they had not.
So then I needed to come up with a title. The song has the beat of a tango, which stands to reason, as I’ve been learning and enjoying some beautiful tango numbers by a famous Argentinian composer, Astor Piazzolla, for more than a year now.
But my jazzy dance number transitions into a pensive love song in a later section. Since that part is rather romantic, I think of it as a nocturne. So, for a tentative title, I came up with “Tango Nocturne.” Catchy, I thought.
When I compose a new piece, I like to post on YouTube and Facebook a video of myself playing it, so my friends and others can give it a listen, should they choose to.
But as there are literally billions of videos on YouTube, I wanted to check and see if others may have used the title “Tango Nocturne” before.
I thought I was fortunate when I got only one hit — something called “Tango Notturno.” As it happens, it’s a romantic song from a German film of the same name made in 1937.
OK, so what’s the big deal? No one is going to mistake my piece for a German song from a black-and-white film dating from the 30s, right? Well, then I listened to an old recording of “Tango Notturno,” also found on YouTube.
And I kid you not, part of that song is nearly identical to my own, in both notes and rhythm!
I cannot for the life of me imagine that I somehow had heard this song before. Or if I did, that I would recall its notes well enough to seemingly serendipitously come up with it while writing my tango.
And how to explain the nearly identical title? Sure, “Tango Nocturne” isn’t exactly the strangest combination of words. But note that the only reason I searched for and discovered this piece of music — and its uncanny similarity to my own — was because I had also come up with the same title!
I know what you’re thinking. The mind works in strange ways, and somehow both the theme and the title were embedded deep in my unconscious and happened to make a veiled appearance last month as I tooled around on my piano.
I suppose it’s possible.
But it might be equally possible (and similarly improbable) that what has been called “the music of the spheres” is running 24/7 out there in the ether, and that now and then we tap into that universal consciousness when we come up with something “original,” or seemingly so.
Think of the great scientific discoveries made at the same time (or thereabouts) in different parts of the world by people who had no communication between them.
Examples of such “multiple independent discoveries” include the development of calculus by both Newton and Leibniz, and of the theory of evolution by Darwin and Wallace. Some say the telephone and computer mouse were also independently developed by more than one inventor around the same time.
Perhaps our brains do indeed tap into some invisible source of new ideas (or songs) whose time has come.
At any rate, I went back and rewrote the part of my piece that was such a close version of the 1937 tune. I also changed the name of my composition to “Latin Nocturne” (yes, there are several other works of music online with that title as well, of course).
I’m just hoping my replacement melody doesn’t turn out to be “borrowed” too!
To listen to “Latin Nocturne” and my other compositions, please visit stuartsmelodies.com and click on Music. If you think you’ve heard any of my melodies before, keep it to yourself! 🙂
