Before you read the rest of this post, just click play on the video below of the video game Minecraft’s soundtrack, and either leave it to play, or click somewhere randomly on the length of the track to play some of its music. It would be appropriate because this post is about how I came upon this music by chance, and fell in love with it for my future writing!
In music, there is a thing called covers, where musicians perform their own interpretations of pieces. Often, these are songs, by different artists other than the original ones, and in the same genre, so rock covers are still rock. However, covers could involve instrumental pieces like classical, jazz, or other wordless compositions. They could be by the same artists later in their career. But for me, the most interesting and fun covers, whether I like them or not, are ones in different genres. For fun, I’d like to share some examples from a Switched on Pop podcast I recently heard on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and wonder why such covers aren’t more prominent in literature with the classics now in the public domain. The podcast episode was the third of four, but the entire series was magnificent and I would highly recommend it!
A week ago, I stumbled across an award winning series on CBC Radio which I absolutely loved! It was a called the Signature Series, and comprised of 5 minute podcasts about each musical key. Each podcast is a poetic narrative about the persona represented by that key, beautifully done by Paolo Pietropaolo, over mostly famous classical music all composed in that key.
You can listen to the series via the CBC websites, or on SoundCloud, where you can “collect” them by Likes or into playlists. However, the SoundCloud free account was so freakingly limited for what you could do with building playlists, especially for this day and age, that I’ve decided I’ll collect them here on my blog for reference, and to share with others.
Here are the podcasts of all the keys, from C to B like on a keyboard, alternating between major and minor keys. Enjoy!
Is there a “golden” tempo that is universally appealing, like the Golden Ratio is universally appealing visually? Not to my knowledge… nor search engine Google’s knowledge, for that matter. However, as I was setting a tempo for a piano étude I had composed a few decades ago, it turned out to be about 100 bpm. That was roughly 1 and 2/3 beats per second, or 1.666 approximated, which wasn’t far from 1.618 approximated that I knew to be the rounded value of the Golden Ratio.
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