I’ve heard people say that wallpapering is a test of a marriage. I think they should try critiquing each other’s creative work.
Christian has always been my earliest set of eyes on a piece of music, and unlike most people, he’s never felt inhibited about telling me exactly what’s wrong with it. In the early years of our marriage, I didn’t handle this well. For those who have never had a creative work critiqued, imagine setting your child out on a pedestal for people to say, “He’s got decent teeth, but the fact that he chews with his mouth open is clearly a reflection on your parenting skills.”
In some ways having a book or a song critiqued is even worse, because a child at least is an independent human being, responsible for his or her own choices. Any flaws in a creative baby are no one’s fault but yours.
It took me several years to learn to accept his feedback with enough emotional distance to be capable of objective receptivity. It also took Christian that long to learn to identify the actual element in a measure or melody or text that doesn’t work. For one thing, he’s taught me not to get all airy-fairy-flowery about religious concepts, but to stay grounded in reality.
But his biggest help to me is with piano parts. I’m an ear-and-chords player (a bad one), so although I can write an interesting enough piano part, I can’t play it, so I never know if what I hear in my head actually works in reality. I tend to assume that if my husband can’t sight-read it, it’s too hard. He has no patience with this particular assumption. “Just give me a minute to play it through first, will you?” he’ll say. “I’ve never seen this before!”
But the photo at the top of today’s post shows a very different sort of shared musical moment. For the past two and a half years, I’ve been going through draft after draft after editorial revision of a collection of Easter hymns arranged for flute and piano, a complement to my Christmas collection, “Come To The Manger.” Some of them wrote themselves; others, well, let’s just say I never knew I could suffer so much angst over a song I’ve been singing since I was old enough to carry a tune.
So it was very satisfying to spend an hour last weekend playing through 25 pages stamped with these words:
Proofs, for those who aren’t deep in the publishing world, are “this is what the inside of the finished product will actually look like,” and as an author you have to go through and make sure there aren’t any mistakes.
This Joyful Eastertide will be available sometime this spring, and I’m quite proud of how it came out. I’m grateful to my editor, Keith Kalemba, for pushing me to dig deeper and not go with the obvious. And I’m grateful to my husband for the countless evenings we put the kids to bed and wanted nothing more than to sit down and veg in front of the TV, and yet instead we went down to the piano to play through yet another attempt at VREUCHTEN or O FILII ET FILIAE.
I guess the couple that plays together, stays together.
Kathleen M. Basi 