When a new telescope is finally put into use, the astronomers rather ceremoniously talk about "first light," which refers to the first official observations made with that telescope. The same is true with my new keyboard, except it is "first sound." I set it up and initialized its drivers on SoyMac the laptop, connected it, and played it for the first time. The keyboard does not make noise on its own, but it controls what's made by Mac's sound-making software, "Garage Band." Though this is just a non-professional hobbyist program, it still has loads of fun sounds to play with, as well as a realistic imitation of piano and organ. It also has a collection of familiar synthesizer sounds, which I have heard through decades of popular music as well as in many of the ambient pieces I listen to.

I have wanted one of these for years and years, ever since I heard a street musician playing a similar keyboard back in Cambridge, Mass. Even twenty years ago there was plenty of electronic music technology to play with. Now it is all digital rather than the analog that the street musician was playing, but that only makes it more accessible and convenient.

I have a manual for GarageBand and I will be learning how to use it in the same methodical way I learned Adobe Illustrator. I don't think I'll have too many problems with it. I should be able to make pre-fab electronic music quite soon. The educational requirements for such sounds are far less elaborate than the requirements for classical music. There are some musicians who cannot allow anything less than fully formed, structurally complex, and philosophically serious music into their universe. I'm not a musician, so that doesn't apply to me.

In the past, I attempted to learn to play the piano, during my childhood and later as a college student. I failed miserably and never had any fun playing. All the music I played was written by classical composers and was mostly too hard for me to play, so I would spend hours and hours attempting obsessively to run through a single Bach passage without a mistake. And I never did get through it. I worked and worked on Bach inventions or preludes and it was as tedious a task as trigonometric identities. (Which I am still memorizing, more on that in a later posting.)

This keyboard, which dropped into my lap as a free gift, excuses me from having to play Bach inventions if I don't want to. In all my years as a piano student, I never improvised at all. My piano teachers didn't even conceive of it, let alone encourage me to do it. Music, like the canon of the Bible, is fixed. If new music must be made, it must be written by those who are highly trained and committed to it. An amateur cannot create good music, any more than an amateur can do serious non-crackpot theoretical physics. So I didn't improvise. But on this keyboard, in the privacy of my home with no one having to listen to me, I can do what I want: pick out chords that sound interesting, follow tunes that I remember from pop or folk songs, or even run through twelve-tone rows or atonal "free jazz." Garage Band gives me a variety of tones and textures to play with. It allows me to do something I have very rarely gotten to do: creative fun.

As a professional artist, art is my job. My visual art work time is always serious and committed. Otherwise I don't get my projects done. Nowadays I rarely draw just for the sake of drawing. And I have gotten almost completely away from the fantasy and science fiction art that used to be so much fun for me to do. I sometimes wonder about that, but now that I am a gallery artist, I cannot be seen to do tasteless unoriginal kitsch like monsters and barbarians and spaceships. Right? It's got to have, you know, redeeming social value. But with my keyboard and music box, no one cares, and professionalism will never rear its ugly head. I have been granted a happy moment of creative irresponsibility.

Posted at 3:34 am | link