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.

 

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Mixing it up.

What we’re doing when we write and revise fiction is what composers had to do before the digital age made push-button music possible. Yes, if they’d had the electronic tools today’s musicians have, they’d have used them. But think of what the great maestros like Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner accomplished back then, with only their brains. Like them, novelists are orchestrating complicated pieces with many players to communicate messages, although the cognitive aspect of our form of communication is as significant as its emotional impact (see my post, “It’s All In The Family,” https://wp.me/p30cCH-1xh).

It’s no coincidence that many songs tell stories, because musical and lexical art have much in common. So when you write and revise a story, let its internal song help guide your efforts to communicate.

WHAT THE HELL

Too bad revising fiction isn’t as easy as clicking buttons and twisting knobs

It’s starting to look like I’ll have a new novel on offer this fall. Indie, of course, since I seem to be persona non grata in the world of literary agents. C’est la vie.

I have another project I’m going to query agents on later in the year, but that’s probably my last shot at the Big Time, I’m afraid. I’ve thrown my best stuff at them and they ain’t biting. A bloke gets weary you know, and a bloke gets cranky too, so I doubt that I’ll have the emotional wherewithal to go the agent route for future work after that one.

But this forthcoming indie book is perfect for self-publishing because it’s timely, it’s political, it’s unorthodox (in some ways at least), and it probably wouldn’t stand a chance in New York. I’ve already designed…

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