It's Always a Journey: I'm Not Writing Many TMEs These Days

I was moving from my session area to my office yesterday after a session that had been a bit challenging, and I was thinking about things as I am wont to do. As ideas and thoughts moved through my head, one of them was that I wasn't really spending much time writing new songs and TMEs lately, but my sessions were full of new music.

You see, I've been improvising lots of music lately.

It's interesting that I go through periods of time when music is at my fingertips, seems to flow out of me, and then it completely disappears. Other times, the music in my head simply has to be written down. It rarely happens at the same time. I find this pattern to my creativity within the music very interesting.

On Monday, I used a song that I often use - Put Your Cough and Your Sneeze in Your Sleeve - and improvised several new verses (I should really update my TME file to include the new verses for later...) about other manners and expectations. My clients seemed to enjoy the first verse (we act out our sneezes and coughs - my hair flies all over the place), so I morphed the song into other verses, made up on the spot.

The response was gratifying - clients engaged in our acting and our expected manners. They seemed to enjoy the fact that I was burping and forgetting my manners. I was also able to embed our program-wide expectations into one of the verses. I've been trying to write a song about those expectations since we first started them! 

For me, writing music down is always a bit of a chore - I have to be in the right mood to sit at the computer and transform my chicken scratch post-it note notations into sheet music, and my rhythm transcription requires an audio playback for accuracy. I almost always have about 20 songs to transcribe at any one time stuck to various surfaces in my life (my dashboard, my bulletin board at work, my theme idea book, in my recording program on my tablet, you name it...). When the mood comes to sit down and put my music into the computer, I am ready to go!

At the moment, I am simply going to enjoy improvising until I make the time to write things down. I hope my clients find our music to be therapeutically enriching to their education and that they are engaged in what we do together.