After quickly learning to read music and sight-read in a short stint of piano lessons (between 5^th and 6^th grade), I happily quit lessons and instead ran in pursuit of learning to play preferred sheet music. “From a Distance” by Bette Midler was my first aspirational song. I tackled that song and won—playing it often enough to drive an older sister to murderous thoughts. From then on, I didn’t care about the complicated music theory and songs in piano books. I just wanted to play what I wanted to play. And I did.

As the years went on, I became a better sight-reader and forced myself to play more complicated music. I was never satisfied with mediocre in anything. I even tried to write accompaniment (based off of years of playing experience) for a few family songs and a few I attempted to write, myself. But those efforts never quite ended up being that good. I could tell the accompaniment was not awful, but it was most certainly missing that je ne sais quoi. That frustration turned me away from music theory instead of toward it. Silly me.

As the years trickled by, I got older and older, and began to think learning music theory and trying to write legitimate music was a path belonging to others. But the desire to play piano better and better never left. I soon discovered, to my chagrin, that the only way to become a much better piano player was to give in. It was me versus music theory, yet again.

True to my nature, I bought a few books on theory and chords and despite my occasional efforts, it just didn’t sink in. I let it go. I tried again. I got frustrated. Why couldn’t I wrap my head around these diatonic chords and key changes. Why couldn’t I make progress?

My major downfall has been to try to learn to write music without writing music. I wanted to write beautiful music without writing ugly music first. I wanted a college degree without going to Kindergarten. (*Dramatic sigh*)

This song is my first venture on an educational venture to learn to compose piano music. Where else it will lead, I am totally uncertain. Thus, my first piece is titled, Uncertainty, because I don’t know where this is all going to lead. But I do know that I had so much fun writing this song in one of my least favorite keys to play, D flat major. Five flats is a terribly uncomfortable key for me to sight-read. In fact, I eschew an excess of four accidentals in general. (*uncomfortable giggle*)

The first thing I did was write down on manuscript paper all of the chords in D flat major. I played them all. I wrote down the feeling each chord gave me: happy, sad, emotional, scary, and so forth. I tried to imagine the types of songs these chords would create. What kind of musical story could they tell. I still felt overwhelmed by jargon like “diminished” and “augmented”, but I resolved to let the vocabulary words go and hang on firmly to the feelings those chords communicated.

Then, I uncertainly ventured into writing a song about feeling uncertain. Here is Uncertainty.