First Song
Flash version. Will play inside your browser.
Non-Flash version. Click on link to download MP3 and play in your music player: Song I.
Okay, taking a deep breath here . . . I hope there’s an arrow, or even a choice of arrows, to click on which, when clicked, will play about thirty seconds of piano music. This is my First Song. You will notice at once* that it’s not Beethoven’s Ninth.** It’s not even a bagatelle.*** But it is a song.† Now listen closely, because this is the only time you will ever hear me say this: Never mind about words. Words don’t matter.†† Besides, Peter has offered to write me some words. Which he’d better do soon to get me out of this treasonous ‘words don’t matter’ credo before I’m arrested by the Professional Authors, Keepers of Small Battered Notebooks in Knapsacks and on Bed Tables and Chocolate Eaters Society. †††
That’s Oisin playing it. I was moaning about trying to record it so I could hang it on the blog—my camera will do tiny audio/video, but shuuuuudder—and he offered. Turns out he has a whole miniature recording studio in the loft over his music room: the wizard’s cave. Not to mention the fact that he probably played it right first time. One of the things I was moaning about was the prospect of playing it 1,000,000 times before I got it right, since the minute I was Recording for Posterity I would absolutely go to pieces.
So. Anyway. Show and tell time. I haven’t been joking. I am writing funny little pieces of music. And if someone identifies this as an old folk tune from East Umphymumbleshire, I admit I’ll be cross.
* * *
* Supposing it plays. It plays for Blogmom—who set it up: not me boss—and for the mods. It doesn’t play for me. Surprise. Not. Sigh. . . .
** Although something I wrote more recently is called Little Thing #1: Possibly a Bagatelle But Nothing Like Beethoven. If my computers ever stop driving me crazy and I am therefore perhaps allowed to finish learning how to use Finale, I’ll post it some day too. Finale’s playback function turns out to have severe limitations as performance^, but unless I do start (re)writing Beethoven’s Ninth, Oisin expresses himself willing to step into the breach caused by my terrifyingly inadequate piano skills. If I learn how to channel Angela Hewitt, I’ll reconsider.
^ Anybody know how to de-plonk the left hand?
*** And it’s in five sharps, if you’re trying to figure that out by listening to it. Its origin is from last spring, when Oisin was still giving me assignments. I was supposed to write a three-part piece with each part four bars long, the first in three sharps, the second in four, and the third in three again. This kept struggling to get out of part two, and after sharping an awful lot of As, I finally hived it off as its own thing. It didn’t really go with parts one and three anyway. Not to mention not being four bars long.
† But it would be very silly to write Beethoven’s Ninth again, so that’s all right.
†† Only in this one, single, solitary, very small and unimportant case words don’t matter! In ALL OTHER cases they matter EXTREMELY!!!!!!
††† And you can hear the words in the music anyway. You just can’t hear what they are.
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