Music

I've noticed I mentioned in my about me thing that I really like music etc, but I have also realised I havn't really talked about this kind of stuff, so here we are.

I have just put down the tanglewood red guitar I so often find peace in playing. I just looked up one of my favourite songs on the internet to play: Streets of London. It's a fatastic and challenging song. It is also beautifull music, and I really love the sound ringing from an acoustic guitar when anyone plays it. The sound of each chord always rings in the sound box and the chords flow so well they mix together beautifully. Often people like to refer to silence as the absence of sounds, but I beg to differ; sound is the absence of silence. Sound enters and leaves. It lingers before it dissapears. Its the sound ringing at the end which really gets me. Its an really well crafted song, and I recommend you to look up the words!

Another song that has been on my mind is Extravagent, a song which was origionally just a poem (John Gowans) but was turned into a song for singing companies (junior choirs in the Salvation Army) by richard phillips. It is really good music but it's the words I wish to discuss.

O let me be extravegent in what I give and do
I want to spend my everything and all my time for you
Not penny pinching miserly, not keeping strict account
Investing all I have and then forgetting the amount

When feeling sorry for myself I start to count the cost
Then I shall be the poorer, what I've gained will all be lost
O Lord, when I begin to stray for dedications track,
remind me of the way you gave, and I'll hold nothing back.

Penny pinching miserly? Guilty as charged. I am awefull at charity. I can do generous, but i really have difficulty in 'giving' money and not really knowing where it is going. Self denial is here, which always creates a poser, but this year we have ben challenged to give somthing up and use the money. I've decided to stop giving up eating lunch from the canteen at work seeing as it can cost about a fiver. In theory that means I will have £20 by the end of SD. Will I be sucsessfull or not? Watch this space...

When feeling sorry for myself I start to count the cost
then I shall be the poorer, what I've gained will all be lost.

Ok probably guilty again. In life we always end up thinking about ourselves and situations everynow and again. In mid-october I was as high as a kite, at the end of november all I could find was a very ripped kite with tangled up string and snapped rod lieing in the middle of a field marked 'Do not enter - Dangerous Bull.' It is all really down to self pity. Don't get me wrong, I don't feel or think everything is perfect again, cause that would just be absolutely stupid, but now we have some light as to why things seemed to be so bad and fall apart.

It is A-level coursework time, and so I am currently finnishing, varnishing, polishing and engraving my latest piece of music. Currently known as the omega, the piece is rather sad and depressing (a reflection of life in my head possibly). It starts as a single melody line, one string of sadness, but nothing too heavy, but is later joined by harmony (2 violins and a cello) which all add and make it very heavy, the burden hard. The idea then repeats it self. Afterwards things start to sound as if they may become more positive as the piano plays the dominent of the relative major, but the sadness remains in that every other bar we return to the tonic of the relative minor, and as this builds in speed it stalls on a note and bursts into a much more active section which momentarily takes ones mind away from the sadness, but the business starts to sound strained and the sadness redevelops and then just to represent the unexpected in life the end of each seven bar phrase there is a ten eight bar. Next the business resolves into a struggle, with instruments 'trying' to rise above each other, but not quite giving that impression as they all continue to work in harmony. Then we get the violins working on their own and other parts begin to join, piling on top of each other, creating awfull dissonance, representing life really, how there can be one struggle and it all piles up, and it all climaxes to a musical explosion, followed by a musical collapse with a piano and cello tremeloing in low octaves. Then the struggle between instruments starts again leading to a falling sequence, which leads again to a stalled note. Then comes a highly atonal violin solo, with pitch bending and minor seconds to sound like a cry for help, untill it all runs down as if someone were collapsing. It then takes a major run up and the origional idea returns again. However, it is much more powerfull, and full of drive and intent, despite the sadness, untill we reach the last bar which is repeated three times, by the pianos left hand whilst the right hand plays a three note falling ostinato in non triplet time, thus fighting the rhythm of the left hand untill they both stop in perfect unity.

So there you have it; Bens musical rundown for the past little while.