During the general curtailing of activities that happened in 2020, I found myself at home with a lot of time on my hands. Spending a lot of time at home with my two young children, homeschooling, camping in the lounge room over Easter, watching some live streaming concerts... It was an interesting time.
My eldest had grown very fond of Melbourne-based jazz pianist/composer Nat Bartsch and was listening to her latest album For Ever and No Time At All very regularly. She even started to pick out the notes of the melodies to some of her favourite pieces on the piano.
Since we were listening to the album via Spotify, I started to feel guilty about how much we were listening to Nat's music, and how little we were supporting her financially. I saw that she had her sheet music for the album for sale on her website, so I added it to my cart, paid up and downloaded the zip file containing the PDFs of the sheet music.
Over the next few weeks, I started playing these lullabies for my kids on the piano while they were heading off to sleep (or at least that's what they should have been doing). I started to notice missing parts or layouts that weren't quite right. So, I decided to send an email offering to work on improving the collection of music.
I was very glad that the response I received from Nat was positive rather than taking offence to someone saying that their sheet music wasn't up to snuff.
Over the next month or so I worked collaboratively with Nat transcribing solo sections, filling out arrangements/transcriptions from lead sheets and generally improving the layout of the sheet music.
I found this process a really interesting one. It's well known that the act of music transcription can give you a detailed look into an artist's idiosyncrasies, preferences and tendencies. I've known Nat for a while now and have been listening to her work for a long time. However, this much more intimate knowledge/appreciation of her work really inspired and lifted my spirits.
I ended up donating my time as a labour of love, again, feeling that artists were already struggling financially this year and I probably still owed Nat some financial contribution given how much joy her music has brought our family.
If you are interested in purchasing the sheet music you can find it on Nat's website. If you are interested in checking out her music, you can find that on her website or on Spotify.
