Mystery Muzak.

Can anyone identify the title and composer of this music?

(The linked recording begins in the last 22 seconds of the piece. To listen to it the way it’s meant to be heard, start the recording at the 24 second mark, play through and immediately repeat.)

This piece is currently used as the “on hold” music for CVS/Pharmacy stores. Nobody seems to know who was the composer: not the fellow who posted the above recording at SoundCloud, and apparently the pharmacy’s corporate people are not sharing that information. The only suggested identification I’ve encountered refers to a brass band march piece, which this romantic piano solo emphatically is not. Rumor has it that the pharmacy company is considering scrapping it for something new.

An admirer of the piece uploaded this image of the basic notation:

Music to write books by.

To me, the romance and drama of the piece put it in the leitmotif category. I blogged about this kind of musical and literary treatment in Do You Write Leitmotifs?

I wrote most of Irish Firebrands while listening to music (sometimes just one piece, all day), and this one may become another of those inspirational pieces while I write The Passions of Patriots.

 

New ‘Don’t Fret’ Mural Celebrates Chicago Writers

Who are the authors that are looking over your shoulder?

Chicago Review of Books

Dozens of Chicago writers can now be found standing together, big shoulder to big shoulder, at a new branch of the Chicago Public Library system in Irving Park. In a painted mural, famous faces from the past such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Ernest Hemingway, and Richard Wright loom with equal prominence to more contemporary writers such as Kevin Coval and Eve Ewing.

Local artist Don’t Fret created the mural, drawing from his own literary inspirations as well as a few names that the library suggested. Don’t Fret has created art inspired by Chicago’s lit scene in the past — you can find his giant mural depiction of Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” poem in the West Loop. Once you know what to look for, you can also spot his work on walls all over the city, particularly in bars along the Blue Line.

The Independence branch (and the mural) debuted on Jan. 22…

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Another Author’s Insight: Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

I made my own experiments in the weights, colours, perfumes, and attributes of words in relation to other words, either as read aloud so that they may hold the ear, or, scattered over the page, draw the eye. There is no line of my verse or prose which has not been mouthed till the tongue has made all smooth, and memory, after many recitals, has mechanically skipped the grosser superfluities.
~ Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself, Chapter III.