Friendship, tea, mountains, trains — biography of a song #1

Blast from the Past

Originally published 3/28/13

Where do I get my ideas for music pieces? I have been asked that by someone every time I’ve performed. I have the answers I have, and none of them seem very useful. And I like answers to be useful!

The answer that would cover most instances — “everywhere!” — probably makes no sense to most people. So I am going to write a series of “song biographies,” so you can see for yourself that “everywhere!” is true, if not enlightening.

This first song biography will be a rambling & convoluted journey, just like creating that solo was.

For my birthday, a year after we were married (so: last millennium (I love writing that!)), my husband gave me a mug for my morning tea. I love everything about this mug — the size, the shape, especially the colors — but what I love most is that it combines the bright colors I love with a picture of a marmalade cat. I had a wonderful marmalade cat at that time (have another one now, in fact), who was named Marma, of course. So the mug has always been my Marma mug, and no one else gets to use it.

Marma mug

Now that we live here, I have my tea in this mug, on the porch, enjoying the mountain vistas, every morning.

Marma mug enjoying the full mountain vista

Nearly every object I own has what I call an icon value: it’s not a mug, it’s the mug Alan gave me that has a picture of Marma on it; something else isn’t just a ring or a necklace or other piece of jewelry, it’s the ring/necklace/jewelry that “Grandma gave me”/“reminds me of Sandie”/“signifies my first recording”. (Yes, it is very difficult to shed physical objects when they are all icons of something important in my life, which is why I have many more things now than ever before. On the other hand, every thing in my life has meaning as well as purpose, and I like it that way.)

The Marma mug has many layers of icon value: a gift from my husband for my birthday; the comforting ritual of morning tea; more generally, friendship & good meals with friends (we do a lot of visiting with friends over breakfast, it’s very cozy & personal). Because of that friendship/breakfast thing, the Marma mug signifies my best friend Sandie also, even though she died a few months before Alan gave me the mug.

You are probably beginning to understand why I said this would be a rambling & convoluted journey!

Summer before last, (ed: 2011) as I was pulling together the music for Drivin’!, I wanted a closing piece. I wanted it to have a warm happy flowing lyrical quality. I wanted it to be my Marma mug, in music. I wanted it to include ...

NO. That’s not right. That’s not how it happened at all.

I had a chord change I was playing with on the piano: A flat, E (A flat = G sharp, that whole luscious enharmonic thing), D flat, A flat. I loved how that sounded!

A flat for me is a very warm & welcoming sounding key. A friendship thing. I had my chord change & I started making up music to embody that and more music to accompany that (can’t just play the million dollar chord change umpty-zillion times because then it’s not so delicious anymore). And then I got stuck.

Often I won’t know all the music until I know the title of a piece. So I started casting about for the title. You might recall me trolling for feedback on Facebook! Warmth, sunshine, friendship.

I kept envisioning my Marma mug on the porch, the mountain vista, Sandie joining me (so a touch of nostalgia crept into the piece), flowers, golden & other bright colors. All of these images gave me more music. For a while the working title was Forget-Me-Nots on a Golden Table. But that was so long and clunky. Also, it just sat there.

And the music kept evolving. I created a contrasting section with a Schubertian melody above and something churning below. Yes, churning. Not what we usually get accompanying Schubert.

By the way, at this point I was a week out from recording. And I didn’t even know the title! But I maybe had all the music; but how could I know that if I didn’t even know the title?!

That contrasting section was new & I was practicing it like mad, so that I’d remember it and land on the intended notes when recording. The churning thing seemed to be very important to the entire piece, although it had to be kept quiet underneath the melody. It was like a train down there, driving the whole song.

Then I realized that even the opening section had a driving left hand (hey, it does belong on Drivin’! after all), and that as much as the piece signified warmth, tea, my Marma mug, friendship, Sandie — it also signified growth, change; all the passages of life, including death.

Thus was born The Golden Passage. In many ways it’s more “the song of me” than anything else I’ve created: warm & lyrical & comforting, with a churning underneath.

What? You say that doesn’t explain how images I see turn into music in my mind? I never promised to answer that. I don’t know that. Ask that question of Oliver Sacks! (He knows, or “if he knows not, no one else does!”)