Neither Bloody Nor Bowed

This is the song I've been working on this week.

I found a Dorothy Parker poem (Indian Summer) in a book of comic verse which I bought in St Leondards on Sea for 33 p. I was browsing in a charity shop looking for things to read. Three for a pahnd.

This made me remember how much I liked DP's poems. So I looked some more up on the internet.

And what a wealth there are. I like them because they are an antitidote to the lyrics of a lot of jazz/pop songs about love. Yes people in her poems fall in love, yes it's beautiful, and painful when it ends. But they also get over their pain, and move on. Losing love is like falling off a bike. You cycle full pelt into a Ford Mondeo, it hurts like hell, you limp about for 6 months feeling miserable with a leg the colour of an aubergine, but soon you're out there in the sunshine singing praises to the morning again on your two wheeled steed.

A lot of DP's poems were written in what the blurb writers on editions of The Great Gatsby might call the 'jazz age'. It seems fitting to try and set some of them. And they seem to invite it. A little swing.

I identify very strongly with the sentiments of this poem. I am not here, taking compositional baby steps, and blogging about it, because I expect to be a success by anyone elses measure. I'm in this for joy of learning and of creating things. I will not get rich cooking Sunday lunch for my friends - but I will probably have a nice time doing it. And so hopefully will they. Creativity is food for the soul.

So I copied the poems out by hand and stuck them with blu tac to the wall above the piano. To let my mind wander over them and maybe associate them with things I'm practising/ experimenting with.

Less than a day later I ended up spending the whole day experimenting with ideas and coming up with this.

It's 21 bars long. I tried to put more bars in to make it a more standard length - but I didn't like it so much that way. So I'm sticking with 21.

This is either
a) beginners ignorance/incompetence (likely)
or
b) highly appropriate to the content of the poem itself (nice excuse but I'm not buying it unless you are).

I originally wrote it in C - but when I tried to arrange (lazily) by using LH strumming chords. It sounded muddy. So I transposed it to G. Then I decided I wanted to send it to a friend who sings to see what she thinks and took a punt on a key she might be able to sing it in (Eflat).

There are some unresolved chromatic passing notes in there.

But I thought they were nice.....