Between Slack and Snapped
Tight Strings
Tight Strings
Music happens in the narrow space between slack and breaking. A string pulled too loosely cannot sing; pulled too tightly, it snaps. Somewhere between those two failures lies tone. Creativity lives in that same tension — ideas pulling against one another until something finally rings true.
This piece became a quiet reflection on the long path by which music finds its way into the world. From hand-drawn staves on notebook paper to a three-voice Commodore 64, from handwritten wedding scores to a home-built music processor called PRESTO, each stage tightened the distance between imagination and sound. I have never felt like an inventor so much as a listener, adjusting the tuning until the fragments settle into coherence.
MuseScore, discovered decades later, did not change the listening — only the immediacy. What once required weeks of copying, coding, or waiting can now be heard almost at once. The technology improved. The process did not. Music still arrives the same way: piece by piece, tension by tension, until it begins to sing.
The strings were tighter now.
