Category Archives: CLMOOC

My friend and collaborator Terry Elliott has been on a “re-wilding” learning adventure, an internal and creative ‘hike’ of art and remix through words and poems and stories and media, and as is his nature, Terry has often invited others along.

Yesterday, he shared a poem and invitation for “trailblazing” and a phrase in his invitation to make something struck me: “… creating a chord on a piano that you don’t know how to play ..”

So I did.

I pulled out my keyboard and plugged it in, found an interesting sound, and then with my left hand, I just sort of dropped it on the lower keys. It’s possible my fingers knew how to find a chord on their own (not that I am a keyboardist but I can do some basics) but the dissonance reverberation of where my fingers landed spurred my right hand to find a note, and then another, and soon, I had a melody developing. (Later, I wondered if I had pirated that melody line from somewhere else … it arrived so easily that I figured, maybe it’s not mine.)

I began to shift my left hand, too, moving the pattern of hand-drop around a bit, but intentionally not paying attention to where my fingers were landing. Eyes closed now. My attention was on the sound, and the small gaps where dissonance and tension opened up into something clearer, and my simple melody lines of my right hand continued to dance over the top of those “chords” of my left hand.

This took me all of about ten minutes to complete, with no planning and very little thinking and the record button “on” and, you know, I liked the results very much. I added the music to an image rendition of Terry’s poem. Trailblazing is always worth the time.

Peace (and keys),
Kevin