The Word Cloud

 My creative project over Christmas occurred by chance.  A colleague at work, bought the wrong sort of cassette recorder.   She wished to use the recorder for recording speech, but all you can do, with the machine she ordered over the internet, is export cassette tapes to a computer.  I borrowed the machine and consequently sent round a CD Christmas card.   

Many years ago, I traced some music scores that had been composed by a grandfather, and my mother played them for me on her piano.  I recorded these on a cassette tape,   The years passed and cassette players have long disappeared and the tapes languished in a drawer. 

Over a frantic weekend before Christmas, I downloaded a programme called ‘Audacity’ and managed to transport the music into Itunes.   I found i could not send these files as an e.mail, but I  was able to burn the playlist to recordable CD’s.   Of course, there are mistakes.  The recordings must have been done with one microphone and have come out on one channel when you play the CD on a CD player.

However, the CDs have been sent off and some are being sent after Christmas, as the post office had been shut, (The cost of a recordable CD is less than the postage. Life is strange.  It might be cheaper for me to leave work because of the cost of my season ticket )

The CD is rather sad; not only because the participants are dead.  The music is a cross section of the sort of  music that was played and performed before the first world war and among the pieces, is a piano score for a military march - the composer’s speciality and a field in which he had some success.  Otherwise, the music of this period is seldom played and often parodied in Victorian melodramas.  It was a period before recorded music took off and music was produced to be performed at home.

There is a musical theme running though the scores I collected - a leitmotiv -and the mournful tolling of Big Ben occurs.  The collected works, put together, are  not unlike a theme by Andrew Lloyd Webber. (Also, some modern, female singers emote far more than would have been acceptable in the most OTT Victorian parlour ballad. Some things never change! )