For each new project, I plan out what notes from the cover music I will mount on the artwork. Since there are not a lot of notes in this sample, I made the mistake of making them larger. The size of my circles went from my recent standard of 1 5/8 to 2 1/8 in diameter. Increasing the size of the notes also increases the width of the music. What I found was that on both the top staff and the middle staff, there was not enough space to hang the song notes. When this happens, I would let the music hang over the edges of the canvas to add more interest. But for this project, I had too many single notes that prevented a simple fix.

The other option would be to add another canvas to make a fourth metal staff support. Rejecting that idea, I found a different solution. Below is an image of the earlier 2026 artwork, Drive. This project uses my standard three 24-inch metal supports mounted in a straight line, similar to traditional musical staffs. With My Foolish Heart error, I decided that my notation no longer needed to be mounted in a straight line.

In later 2026 artworks, I experimented with an uneven mounting of the music, mostly for special effects. The image below, From the Start, is an example where I created a step effect for the single repeated word, “blah, blah, blah.” To solve the mounting issues with this project, I zig-zagged all three of the support metal staffs using different lengths of standard metal pieces from Menards, thereby making the staffs longer and easier to mount the music. This eliminates one of the last sacred standard features of sheet music.

Scott Von Holzen