Callehe

There are times we all have to take stock of our lives. Rather simple questions are fraught with deep contemplations, usually with some wine or extremely expensive scotch. These questions are usually the of the ilk of: Who am I? Where am I? What have I done? Where am I going? What am I going to do? (N.B.: There are times which you have to ask yourself these questions and you shouldn't deeply contemplate. In these situations, you often need to run, call a guy to set up an alibi, or help fill in the gaps from the missing days, and usually help you bury the body. Adrenaline, not reflection, gets you through those situations.)

When I look at what I've done, I'm usually happy (orbis non sufficit aside). I kept a running list of things to do before I died (or entered a cryogenic state to wait out my enemies and conquer the world). I've crossed off a whole lot of those things. This memory is about a musical cross off. I always wanted to write a song that captured "something". Then I wanted to capture specific "somethings."

This begins in December of 2005. I sat down and started with a piano piece. Now, I'll never claim to know music theory, but I knew I wanted to do something different. What I ended up with were variations on a somewhat haunting theme. The problem was, I essentially had two pieces that went with it, but they didn't go together. That's when I realized, that's what made it work.

Callehe is a character of mine. There's various incarnations of her in pretty much whatever I write. She's even been worked into stories for RPGs I've run. Whatever the universe, Callehe's an interesting person, to me. She was first conceived of as the main antagonist of my Great American Novel. She's a vile little girl who is also paranoid schizophrenic. She's not vile because she is crazy. She's just malice incarnate. It had a side effect on her mental well-being though.

Callehe and her many incarnations struck me as I considered the piano piece I had nearly finished. When those disjointed melodies were joined to represent her, I finally had captured that "something" or at least a fraction of it. I had my picture of a fractured, evil little mind.

The file started off as Kappa.mus (following my music naming conventions) and then became Callehe.mus. I finally upgraded my version of Finale and I had the ability to move beyond the midi and have actual sound samples of a Steinway Grand Piano play my disjointed song. I fine-tuned it from there, playing more fully with dynamics and the expressions. Finally, I had the right mix of plotting, malice, and insanity. In Callehe these different facets are expressed into one haunting leitmotif throughout the piece. (Later re-arranged into Callehe Major this point is made much prevalently.) Sure, legendary composer Nubuo F. Uematsu wrote the Mad Jester Kefka's theme and captured something similar, but Callehe's mine, my own, my precious, vile, little crazy thing.

I tentatively played it for my friends at the end of 2005. I took their feedback, discarded any changes they had suggested, and then completed it on my own in the opening days of 2006. I would continue to re-arrange it as upgrades to my computer made it possible to support more and more channels of instrument sampling. The definitive version for awhile was Callehe for Strings, until it was eclipsed when the last set of upgrades made Callehe Major possible for full ensemble. I presented Callehe for Strings, as part of a presentation in Abnormal Psychology about depictions of mental illnesses in media. The professor and class agreed that it was indeed a song about schizophrenia.

For the final reckoning, I'll always be able to say I did this. I captured something in a unique way.

And I did it my way.