The Music Composer (Part 1 of 4)

Before I started playing the drums, I went through as phase I referred to then as composing. The little histories about great composers that I had to do for my piano teacher sparked an interest in me. While I was beginning my piano lessons, my dad bought a new record and played it quite a bit. It was called Switched on Bach. It was the music of Johann Sebastian Bach in an electronic music setting. Walter Carlos was the man playing the music on the Moog Synthesizer. My dad really liked the record, but I liked it even more.
I was always playing it and listening to the detailed music written over two hundred years earlier. Shortly thereafter, I decided I wanted to be a composer myself. Usually I said, “Where I grow up I want to be....” But not this time. I would say instead, “1 am a composer. And I started with full gusto.
At first I used music paper that I drew myself. It was fairly easy.
I just needed to draw five straight lines that were quite close together. This made up the music staff on which I could write musical notes. I was intrigued by music. Not only by the artistic way that performers rendered someone’s music, but also by the art work of putting notes on paper for others to read. Although there were only a few times that I could actually say I had written real music, I did enjoy making little black notes on music paper. I loved to look at it and one day while rummaging through an old dresser in our basement, I found a whole drawer full of music. I was finding music that was much more complicated than the music I was learning in my piano lessons, and I had a slight desire to learn to play the piano well enough so I could play that music.