Things That She Said 1 by Samantha Liu

So this is my first "stupid thing" that I'm posting on this blog. I figured instead of sitting around being sad about how I suck at music, I should probably, you know, practice making music? so I took this old shitty poem I wrote as a basic constraint, and wrote a simple melody around the poem. The poem isn't supposed to be lyrics or anything, just a basic guide for how the mood of the song should develop over time. Here's the poem:

Things that she said
Open your heart
Uncloud your mind
Let yourself go
But stay on the ground
Look up at the sky
And come back inside

The poem has a three-ish feel, so I thought the music should be in 3. The poem was actually about things that my violin teacher said, and my struggle to resolve the paradoxical advice to let myself be spontaneous and free, but then also to show discipline and restraint and control.
So it starts our sorta casual and attempts to expand and brighten culminating in "let yourself go" but then falls back down (i think measure 16 is the best I got in this regard).

What I really want to say about this, instinctually, is OH MY GOD IT SUCKS SO MUCH WHY AM I EVEN TRYING I HATE THIS I HATE MYSELF AND I HATE EVERYTHING I DO I SHOULD JUST GO DIE RIGHT NOW AND I'M EMBARRASSED FOR THIS THING'S EXISTENCE AND WHYYYYY DID I EVER THINK I COULD DO THISSSS

but I gotta REPLACE NEGATIVE THOUGHTS with MORE POSITIVE ONES and not be FUCKING TOXIC FOR ONCE so, the rational thing to say about this is,

I guess it starts out ok enough. It's really unoriginal, but the point of this exercise wasn't really to be original, it was more about just getting started with something, no matter how simple AND SHITTY it is. I guess it accomplishes what I set out to do, which was to make a simple melody which roughly follows the emotional contours of this poem, even if it doesn't accomplish it all that convincingly or interestingly. I dislike the ending though, because jarring key change. Turns out I have no idea what I'm doing. I already knew that. If it makes it any better, I wrote the whole thing down on paper without listening to it first, and I already knew that it was going to sound kind of funny, but I didn't know HOW funny it would sound until I put it into musescore at which point I was like oh no this is really bad.
well, I remember thinking coming out of measure 16 that it would be weird to end the thing in G major/brighter key than it started in so basically I was like i should probably switch to something else, I need more of a mood change anyways. I thought about just ending in G minor, but I wanted it to feel calmer/bittersweet, not darker. so i was like fuck it i'm just gonna do whatever and just end it. The result was a jarring key change and also deviation from the 4-bar phrase pattern that had been set up, because I tried to force the music in a direction I didn't know how to make it go.

So what I learned from this is that you can't just randomly decide to change keys in the middle of a melody. use pivot chords. note to self, learn how to do that.

So that was my first post of a stupid thing I made. How do I feel about it? Still a little bit embarrassed. There is a lingering feeling that what I have just put out into the world is a shame upon myself, my family, and anybody who's ever associated with me, and especially my music teachers. But I know that all of that it just bullshit in my head. Even if this were really the worst garbage that anyone in history starting out in composition ever wrote, I'm just going to have to be ok with that. I have no delusions of being good. I'm just trying to do this for myself, I'm just trying to not be afraid anymore.
Ok, well... I guess that's enough for today.