An Improvised Instrumental Moment

Once again, I've allowed it to get down to the wire before sharing a musical endeavor for my New Year's resolution on Vocal (which was to create and share one song per month for the duration of 2025; I'm including the link to the original piece which describes this resolution below).

The wording of my resolution suggested that each month would include a lyrical song; I am, however, bending my own not-perfectly-elucidated rules slightly with this submission - in that the recording below includes no lyrics, but is rather a purely instrumental piece. I have decided to post this lyric-less piece for what I think are two very good reasons, and will go into minor detail regarding each of these reasons (especially since a word count of 600 is required for submissions to the Beat community!).

First, I wanted to provide a bit of a window into the improvisational and experimental process that lies behind much of my creative musical process. Sometimes, the poetry come first, and my task is to find or forge a tune which can appropriately bear those words. Much of the time, however, I find myself at the keys or strings of the piano or guitar, carrying no preconceived lyrics to that moment, looking to discover some emotion or character through the exploration of an instrument. I love the alchemical process of combining incomplete poetry and musical motifs, hoping that magic will emerge somewhere within their imperfect junction. But I have found that in order to "prepare my ingredients," as it were, for those moments, it is necessary that I come to the table with at least a ghost or two of an idea - especially on the musical side of things. Therefore, a noteworthy amount of my time is spent at my instrument of choice, recording hours of melodic improvisation and experimentation. In this way, I am able to cultivate a library of musical ideas to reach into for when I do have a set of lyrics which I would like to turn into a song. Rather than just sitting at the piano with a poem in front of me and a creative despair in my heart, I can turn to the overburdened storage space of my mobile phone - which has become replete with these recordings of my experimental musical motifs. SO - to wrap up this behemoth of a paragraph - I share this instrumental piece today because it is an example of one such improvised motif, and I love the idea of giving you folks a further window into my creative process.

The second reason with which I justify the sharing of an instrumental piece is the fact that I have SO many lyrics-heavy pieces of music in the works right now, which will be posted and submitted to the Harmonic Verses challenge throughout the month of April. I do not know why my mind is so wont to jump onto a new creative project, mere seconds after laying the groundwork for a previous one; a professional diagnosis could probably give me an answer. Whatever the case regarding my attention span and creative habits, they have landed me in a spot of having about a half-dozen musical projects going all at once - all inspired by the Harmonic Verses challenge. I do not know, realistically, how many of these will be brought to a state of completion and submitted in time for that challenge. Only time will tell! But in the meantime, I thought the promise of a future onslaught of lyrics-focused musical posts might justify, for today (and for the month of March), a submission for my personal resolution which does not burden dear listeners with lyrics. Instead, I hope this incomplete, improvised, instrumental moment can be a pleasant surprise and change for anyone following along with my musical journey this year.

Cheers, all! Thank you kindly for reading and/or listening. :)