The Law of Intertia

That's me in the picture. I'm the one with the "bottle". That's outside a theater in downtown Parkersburg, WV. We had time to kill before a Sunday matinee performance. As musicians tend to do, we entertained ourselves.

Now, I'm no scientist, but if my memory serves me correctly, the law of inertia goes something like this: A body at rests wants to stay at rest, and a body in motion wants to continue in the same direction unless acted upon by an outside force. Now, that's physics. In other words that's a law for physical things. But we all know that the same principle really applies to more abstract things such as the emotional or physical energy to get something done. It's sort of like going to the gym, getting started is half the battle.

For the past 10 days I was a body at rest. I intended to take a weekend off. That's a good thing. I can devote time and energy to other things like my wife and the yard. Those leaves they are a fallin'. No problem. But then something crept in. Just one more day. Then another. Then it's Wednesday. I'm gone from 8 a.m. until 9:30 p.m. teaching at Towson University and then Archbishop Curley High School. I'll get back to it Thursday....nope. And so it went through a second weekend until today.

Finally, back to it. I take a listen to the playback on Finale and everything sounds cool so far. The problem is, it ended with the saxes playing a figure that spills over to the next phrase, but I had no idea where I was going with it. A few more plays and no recollection. So, now I not only have to interpret all this Stravinsky and translate is to a jazz piece but I have to translate my own writing as well and produce some sort of logical continuation of what I have just done. It becomes something like different people writing a story by one person writing one paragraph and passing the manuscript to the next person who then writes the following paragraph. I was really quite stuck for a while. I did manage to finally figure out what to do and how to keep moving.

I have now basically finished my tenth chart on this project. "Mystic Circles of the Young Girls" is now ready for lots of proof reading and tweaking (enharmonics, consistent dynamics, etc.) and then eventually part extraction and printing. But better yet, inertia is now for me, not against me. I have once again become a body in motion. I will continue to move in the same direction unless some outside force should start to work against me. I've got the ball rolling again and will be able to keep working with much less effort.

Perhaps this calls for a nap