The unnoticed blessings
Mar. 31st, 2009 07:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerJan's listening to Paul Temple stories now, so I'm hearing an awful lot of the opening and closing bars of "Coronation Scot" by Vivian Ellis, which the Beeb used as the theme. It's become something of an earworm.
It never gets stale. I haven't wanted to be rid of it, not once.
Most people would probably think of it as wallpaper music, easy listening stuff. Light music. Some people on my flist might not even think of it as music, for various reasons. We use stuff up so fast these days, we don't have room to hold it all, and things like this get pushed out into limbo, used by comedians to evoke cosy middle-classness, or ignored or forgotten completely. I've found a whole album of the stuff right here, and recognised nearly every piece as something I heard in my childhood (and one as the tune for a comic song in a Two Ronnies serial: I must remember that one).
But it's good music. A simple rhythm, dum-a-dum-a-dum, the same one they used in Star Trek to indicate rising tension, here put under a simple melody in a major key (pentatonic till it changes key, actually, now I listen), and there it is in the mind's eye; the archetypal British landscape that we associate with steam trains, the one you saw at the beginning of the first two Harry Potter films with the Hogwarts Express chuffing through it. Trees and hills and rivers, under a blue sky with puffy white clouds, and another white cloud tracing the line of the railway from one town to another. All that from a piece of wallpaper music. It works.
Sometimes I get dazed by the sheer wealth of human creativity we have at our fingertips...and amazed at how easily we forget.
It never gets stale. I haven't wanted to be rid of it, not once.
Most people would probably think of it as wallpaper music, easy listening stuff. Light music. Some people on my flist might not even think of it as music, for various reasons. We use stuff up so fast these days, we don't have room to hold it all, and things like this get pushed out into limbo, used by comedians to evoke cosy middle-classness, or ignored or forgotten completely. I've found a whole album of the stuff right here, and recognised nearly every piece as something I heard in my childhood (and one as the tune for a comic song in a Two Ronnies serial: I must remember that one).
But it's good music. A simple rhythm, dum-a-dum-a-dum, the same one they used in Star Trek to indicate rising tension, here put under a simple melody in a major key (pentatonic till it changes key, actually, now I listen), and there it is in the mind's eye; the archetypal British landscape that we associate with steam trains, the one you saw at the beginning of the first two Harry Potter films with the Hogwarts Express chuffing through it. Trees and hills and rivers, under a blue sky with puffy white clouds, and another white cloud tracing the line of the railway from one town to another. All that from a piece of wallpaper music. It works.
Sometimes I get dazed by the sheer wealth of human creativity we have at our fingertips...and amazed at how easily we forget.
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-31 07:12 pm (UTC)Now if I could find the music for "Tales of the Riverbank" (someone once told me it was a guitar arrangement of Bach, but I've never found it)...
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Date: 2009-03-31 07:17 pm (UTC)"The theme music played on guitar is based on 'Andante in C' by Mauro Giuliani."
And here it is. (http://www.oreshko.co.uk/giulianiAndante.htm)
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Date: 2009-03-31 07:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-31 08:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-01 12:14 am (UTC)"A soldier I would be-be-be! To fight for the old ****, fight for the old ****... " (etc.) =:o>
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Date: 2009-04-01 12:38 am (UTC)*is confused*
no subject
Date: 2009-04-01 10:50 am (UTC)low-G | C G C E G G G, | F G-F E D E F-E D low-G
| C G C E G G G, | F G-F E D E F-E D low-G | C ...
(Where a hyphen indicates semi-quavers, comma=either a crotchet rest or "make this one a minim", and all other notes are quavers. )
There's a tune I learned in the school payground:
lG | C, lG C, lG | C lG C E G,
D | F, D F, D | F D B D lG,
lG | C, lG C, lG | C lG C E G,
E | F F-F E D, E E-E D C | D D-D C B C,
And the words I learned to go with it were:
A sol-, A sol-, A soldier I would be,
Two pis-, two pis-, two pistols on my knee,
For cu-, for cu-, for curiosity,
To fight for the old count-, fight for the old count-,
fight for the old country!
(It's all in the pronunciation. =:o} )
no subject
Date: 2009-04-01 01:20 pm (UTC)The tune you thought I was talking about was not the one I meant ("Coronation Scot") which goes (transing to C):
C, D E, D C D E G E, D C D E G A G A C' E',...
(hence my comment about it being pentatonic, which that other one isn't...)
The one you're thinking of is the one they used for Doctor Caseley's Fin Book, that series about the renowned authority on shark recognition, and I'm not sure what it's called* but it's probably on that album as well. And the one you learned in school is, of course, a free adaptation of the opening of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by Mozart. (Much too posh for the kind of school I went to...)
*Third movement ("March") of the Little Suite by Trevor Duncan and Leonard Charles Trebilcock.
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Date: 2009-04-01 10:37 pm (UTC)I'm burbling, gimme sleep... [SNORE] =:o}
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Date: 2009-04-01 06:56 am (UTC)I still have Coronation Scott and the Devil's Gallop as regular inclusions on the MP3 player