avevale_intelligencer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
avevale_intelligencer) wrote2009-03-31 07:07 pm
avevale_intelligencer) wrote2009-03-31 07:07 pm
The unnoticed blessings
Jan'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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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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"A soldier I would be-be-be! To fight for the old ****, fight for the old ****... " (etc.) =:o>
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I still have Coronation Scott and the Devil's Gallop as regular inclusions on the MP3 player