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Showing posts from February, 2020

Goodbye to Berlin

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The first line of the lyric is a derivation from Christopher Isherwood's novel about Weimar before the rise of Hitler.    "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking."     The Guitar Version:   Lead Sheet:   

2020 Photography

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Final cut for 2020 #shadows

The Music of Language

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On Twitter, someone posted a clip of Anthony Hopkins reciting the last stanza of the Dylan Thomas poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night , in a post related to Brexit. I was moved by the natural prosody and the natural rhythms in the words in its recitation. It is written in the form of a villanelle , a ballad-like song with no fixed form. Both Thomas and Hopkins seem to evoke a march rhythm. In both cases, I am interpreting it in an A Dorian context (Am/D). "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" can be a repeating refrain, even softly under the rest of the poem. It's a kind of "soft" protest march. At a slower tempo, it could be dirge-like. Audio export from Finale