I have noted a few times in these very pages that I love reading old magazines, even when they're no longer "relevant". Which is why when, a while back, my Dad decided it was time I took over the collection of Page 6/New Atari User magazines he'd been holding onto for years, I was thrilled. This was an opportunity to revisit a variety of memories — some of which were still clear as day, others of which had mostly vanished into the mists of "the past" until I was prompted by something I'd read.
Today I happened to be reading one of my Dad's old "Making Music with Your Atari" columns. In it, he described the process he and my old clarinet teacher (also My Brother's Girlfriend's Father, as referenced a few times in Atari ST A to Z videos) were taking in using Emagic's "Notator" software to produce professional-quality printed musical scores.
The pair of them had taken on a project to produce proper scores for a piece of music that an acquaintance of MBGF had written. If I remember correctly, she was getting on a bit in years, and the piece of music in question had never been properly published, unlike many of her other pieces; my Dad and MBGF decided that they wanted to do this nice thing for her — and learn a great deal about using Notator in the process.
I hadn't thought about this whole project for years. I don't know that I'd say I'd forgotten it, because I ended up inheriting a lot of the said composer's pieces of music after she passed away (for some reason — I never met her, so I can only assume they came via MBGF) and thus I get an occasional reminder that she existed. But what I hadn't thought about for a very long time was what a major part of our life at home this whole Notator project was.
My Dad worked insanely hard on it, and after reading the article I remembered it being something that was part of our lives for a surprisingly long time. I had forgotten that my Dad and MBGF had the intention of setting up a small music publishing company named after the piece of music they had worked so hard on, and that they weren't expecting to make a profit, but hoped at least they broke even. (I have no idea if they did in the end or not, but I suspect my Dad and MBGF at least found it a valuable learning experience if nothing else.)
It's fascinating to have so many of these almost-forgotten memories written down on paper to stumble across every now and then. As a general rule, I have the kind of mind that has absurdly good long-term memory for the most mundane and stupid things — little social interactions that have been forgotten by everyone else who was involved in, usually — but as this experience attests, there are things that get pushed into the back of even a long-term memory like mine.
(I should probably also add at this point that my short-term memory is atrocious; my wife can tell me she's going out later and I will have forgotten by later in the day.)
Anyway. That's my story for today. Read old magazines. You never know what you might end up remembering!
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