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!
Have you ever seen one of those statements, articles, or even books that touts all of life’s lessons being contained in something? Often, it’s some passion someone has, like marathon running, or some show or movie. Sometimes it’s in a relationship or person, whether it’s one with your dog, or a hero/heroine you look up to.
For a future quote to point to some fun references, I’m wondering if you’d mind leaving a comment and completing the phrase Everything I needed to learn about life, I learned…
You don’t need to explain it if you don’t want to. That would likely be rather long, I would think, because there’s a LOT to learn about life! But if you want to, you go for it.
I’m not going to explain my choice much other than to say, go see it and think hard, over and over again, about all the many things said, situations presented, solutions developed. And also think about all the things not said, or done, but perhaps implied. So my answer is Continue reading
Bob Dylan
Blowin’ in the Wind is a Bob Dylan classic that is not only simple in its chording, but can also be played in 3 different keys without needing any difficult chords or capo. That means no bar chords, or even chords requiring 4 fingers! You can play and sing it in the keys of A, D or G, depending on where you vocal range lies.
Or you can do it in all three keys as I have arranged and shown in the video below! You play and sing each verse in a progressively higher key as the urgency grows in the lyrics. Notes are included in the printable guitar and ukulele tab PDFs below the video.
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Daniel J. Levitin wrote an absolutely brilliant book called The World in Six Songs, supported by a great website with the many music samples referenced, among other great related material.
My basic paraphrasing of the concept is this. All the songs in the world could be fit into at least one of six categories providing an evolutionary benefit to humanity, often ultimately tied to our social nature.
I have written about each category individually in separate posts, with song examples, listed below with links if you want to know more. However, here is how author Daniel Levitin has summarized the songs:
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If you are not a songwriter, your challenge is to name one song you can think of for as many categories as you can.
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If you are a songwriter, your challenge is to write at least one song for each category in your career, because songs in some categories are not that easy to write if they serve the purposes required of songs in that category. I highly recommend you read either my posts or the book for more details on each type of song before writing some songs for each category because song classifications can be misleading to someone briefly familiar with the theory. For example, the Oral Torah that is all about the sacred text of Judaism is a song of knowledge, not religion, because it preserved knowledge, not associated with rituals.
I AM !!!
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Flesch-Kincaid Grade Reading Level: 11.7
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