Muzak for Storytelling.

By chance I heard this piece of music on a classical radio streaming site, but although I had no idea who composed it or what its title was, somehow I knew every note, and was humming or whistling along throughout. Before the piece ended, I went to the computer that was streaming the music, got the identifying info, and later went looking for recordings online. There are several to be found, including a couple of piano reductions and a recording that purports to be of the composer conducting the piece, but this one (an excerpt from a much longer concert) is my favorite:

I’ve seen other conductors who had active styles, but Sergiu Celibidache (1912-1996) takes the cake. He conducts with every muscle of his body, including his eyebrows, shoulders, torso, elbows, and even his tongue. You can see him whistling along with the wind instruments and the strings, imitating the brass, and can hear him shout directions.

The orchestra puts its heart into accompanying him as he almost dances on the podium. Maybe he got into the piece because he and the composer (George Enescu, 1881-1955) were countrymen (Romanians), but his performance here is pure body-language storytelling; moreover, I’ve never seen another conductor who smiled as much as he did, while leading music.

Incidentally, get a load of the enormous 1970s television camera stationed at upstage right.

(Many thanks to the person who posted this musical excerpt.)

 

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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.

 

Does Your Story Have Its Own Soundtrack?

We’ve talked about at the role that music plays in the story in fiction, as well as examined the Irish Trad music that accompanied much of the writing of Irish Firebrands, and ended up representing specific scenes in the story; we’ve also looked at the influence that Wagnerian music has in my background, and how it’s come to have a part in the writing of my work-in-progress, The Passions of Patriots.

I believe that the practice of listening to music throughout the process of writing Irish Firebrands was instrumental (no pun intended!) in preventing writer’s block. From what I’ve read at other Indie Authors’ blogs, if they write to music (vocal or instrumental), it’s to works that have distinctly identifiable artists, themes, genres, or cultural origins.

Today we’ll talk a little about tapping a source of music that’s not already identified with other particular forms or artists, and using that music to come up with a unique “soundtrack” for our own literary art.

Kevin MacLeod’s INCOMPETECH.COM is an excellent source for mood music to accompany any artistic endeavor – and he offers his compositions ROYALTY FREE. This is amazingly generous of the man, because what he’s got on his websites counts into the hundreds of works that range in length from just a few seconds, to the duration of a typical popular song, and even performances that rival the length and complexity of the movements of major orchestral works.

The great thing about MacLeod’s music is that it has no strings attached to other works of art, as do songs performed by vocalists, or the works of classical composers, or the soundtracks of motion pictures. The pieces you find on the website are simply snippets of feelings captured in sounds – a talent for musical expression at which MacLeod excels.

The works that appear at INCOMPETECH can be searched for genre, mood, and other qualities. All pieces have their own descriptive names, but they’re not labels that will necessarily interfere with the listener’s own interpretation of the music. This makes them valuable for constructing “soundtracks” to accompany the writing process. MacLeod often gives us the benefit of his creative impressions of many pieces, he usually lists the instruments (or choral accents) that are programmed into the performances, and he also provides suggestions for how to loop, mix, or otherwise manipulate much of the music. The tracks are downloadable in MP3 format.

I spent a few hours listening to and downloading selections that “spoke” to me: a 90-minute playlist to accompany my creation of The Passions of Patriots. This new collection makes the third set of inspiring musical works I’ve collected to help me visualize scenes and give cadence to dialogue for this particular writing project. I can listen to them uninterrupted during keyboard time, and also play them at night, to help seed my subconscious mind with “memories” of events in the Parallel Universe of Fiction.

Check out Kevin MacLeod’s site, and see what he’s got that can help smooth your creative path in the world of Written Artistry.