Sound and Shadow

About five and a half months ago, I wrote, "I'd like to be a studio musician for my day job and in the evening I paint and draw what ever I want and occasionally sell something."

A few of months later, Rude Cactus asked, "If money was no object, what's your ideal gig?"

After some thought I put my reply up and said, "It's not money that keeps me from doing what, for the moment, I would like to do, it's the fact that that I can't sight-read music, or draw." (Although, honestly, the money would stop me, too. I just don't have to think about the money, at all.)

He wrote back, "Those are luckily things - mostly - you can learn."

The "mostly" is what stopped me from snarking back. Still his comment has stuck with me since first reading it. (Almost as much as a comment my Uncle mad to me at Easter. Cripes.)

On the sight-reading front, I did marching band for three years in high school. Trumpet. I was a competent player. Nothing spectacular. My range went from several bars below the staff to just above the top. On the trumpet, though, the higher, the better. Still, I was very solid backup for the first chair. Give me a third or second part and I could harmonize and support the difficult work the first part played as well as anyone.

I liked being a second or third chair player. We may not have always played the full melody, but the parts were always interesting.

And then one day, in my third year, I was asked by the teacher to try out for the advanced jazz band. (I think it mostly happened because my best friend was the A1, top of the heap, best soprano sax player we had, not because I was really that good, but I was still flattered.) The only thing was that I'd have to try out along with the other possible trumpets. We all showed up one afternoon. He handed us each a piece of music then one at a time told us to stand up and play what we saw.

To say I screwed up insults all the people who screw things up. I was horrible. What I played hardly sounded like music. Oh, sure, there were changes in pitch and tempo and there was some sort of rhythm, but nothing like what appeared on sheet in front of me. The teacher was so embarrassed, or ashamed, at my performance that he hardly spoke to me for the next two weeks. (Which was really a blessing. He was often a creep once you grew out of enjoying his childish behavior.) I wasn't surprised, though, because I knew I couldn't sight-read.

For those who don't know, sight-reading is the act of looking at a piece of music and being able to hear it in your head and then play the tune as you're first looking at it. (Also called sight playing or sight singing.) These people see the note and hear the rhythm they make and pitches they represent and then recreate it. I couldn't, and can't, do either of those things.

I can look at a new piece of music and say, out loud, what the note's called. I can point and say, "That's a quarter note. It's a G flat. Then there's another quarter note, C, followed by a half note tied into a whole note in the next measure, an E." I can't clap the rhythm. I can't hum or sing the correct pitch for any of the notes named. I can read the marks on the sheet, it's not gibberish to me, but I can't tell what it's supposed to sound like.

In college, I took a semester of piano. I worked around my sight-reading problem by having the teacher or her TA play the piece for me before I started practicing the music. That way I'd hear it and when I looked at the sheet, I could hear the music as well as just read it. And I had a lot of fun playing music again. So, when the semester was over, I bought my self a decent keyboard so I could keep practicing.

It didn't work out so well. I could practice and get better at the stuff I already knew, but I couldn't play anything new. I'd leaf through my beginner/intermediate book and look at all the things we didn't play and try my damnedest, but I wasn't playing music. It was just sound.

Eventually, I just stopped. It wasn't fun playing the same things over and over again. I didn't know how to do something new and noodling around got boring.

Other than the ceramics stuff I bought and mixed in with my mother's ceramics stuff, I think that keyboard is the only thing I left at my parent's house after I moved out the last time.

The drawing thing, well, I'll do my best to explain.

I can sketch and doodle and cartoon a little. My people look like people. My faces tend to turn out masculine. And the houses I draw are the simple kind with a big square, a triangle, a rectangle, and a couple of little squares for windows.

One of my problems, when I draw or paint or anything, is that I don't have a steady, consistent hand. I can't consistently duplicate anything. Even when I want to draw the same person, the second drawing looks totally different from the first. Of course, anyone who's seen my hand writing can tell stories about that. The first "a" I write looks similar but distinctly different from the second, from the third, from the last. I suppose that means I have very little control over my hand.

The biggest problem I've found, since I started looking more closely at art and trying to understand it and do it, are shadows.

In most really great drawings and paintings, the artist works like a sculptor. The artist uses the blacks and grays of shadows to carve away the white of the paper and bring out a form. With charcoal or water color they start with the shadow light and then add layer after layer to darken gradually so it shows the curve of the person or object. They see shadows as gradual shifts from white to black.

I see shadows as shapes. After I draw the shape, I have a hard time figuring out how to shade the interior to add depth. Even with art classes, I haven't been able to get past this.