Piano, private and public

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:3 mins read

For your listening enjoyment, here’s a recording of me performing New Age pianist David Lanz’s lovely arrangement of “Joy to the World,” which is a joy to play. Yes, I know it’s mid-February as I’m posting this, so a Christmas song is technically out of season. But it’s good music anyway, no matter when you hear it.

About thirty years of my life have involved playing the piano in public, including in a multitude of Protestant church settings, and also for public events like commencement ceremonies and choir concerts at my last college. The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic put a stop to that. But I still play regularly for myself, and occasionally, when the mood strikes, I record it. That’s where this particular performance came from: I was playing some Christmas music in solitude in mid-December, and I decided to hit the record button.

If you’re already familiar with Lanz’s arrangement of “Joy to the World,” you’ll notice that I made a couple of minor, considered changes to it, including a different timing for the left-hand chords in the penultimate two measures.

If you’d like to hear more of my playing, see the following items, which I shared with readers of my Living Dark newsletter over a span of months. The first two are original compositions by me.

An old song for a new apocalyptic age

This morning I found my thoughts turning to an old song by Sting, “Love Is the Seventh Wave,” along with Sting’s rather profound comments on it. Both his comments and the song’s lyrics strike me as resurgently relevant to our current state of global conflict and crisis, and I was rather moved when I looked up the lyrics and reread them after all these years.

Sting wrote the song during the culminating years of the Cold War, when a sense of doom hung over everything (as I well remember, because I was 15 when the song came out). In an interview for the NME, he explained the song’s central metaphor and shared his intent when writing it:

In popular myth, if you count the waves on a sea shore, the seventh wave is supposed to be the strongest, the most profound. And I felt that at present the world is undergoing a wave of evil, if you like. The world’s never been as polluted. We’ve never had as many missiles pointing across the borders, or as many armies in waiting. We seem to be in the grip of this growing sense of doom. And the song is uncharacteristically hopeful, saying that behind this wave there’s a much more profound one. It’s love, beyond selfishness. And I think if there isn’t this wave, then we are finished. So it’s singing about something and hoping that by singing about it you’ll create it. The alternative, thinking that in five years’ time the world will end, isn’t that helpful. It might sell records, but it doesn’t help the people listening.

Here are the lyrics, which, as I said, come off as at least as relevant to our current global cultural moment of crisis and collective sense of impending doom as they were to the original context in which Sting wrote them:

In the empire of the senses
You’re the queen of all you survey
All the cities, all the nations
Everything that falls your way, I say

There is a deeper world than this
That you don’t understand
There is a deeper world than this
Tugging at your hand

Every ripple on the ocean
Every leaf on every tree
Every sand dune in the desert
Every power we never see

There is a deeper wave than this
Smiling in the world
There is a deeper wave than this
Listen to me, girl

Feel it rising in the cities
Feel it sweeping over land
Over borders, over frontiers
Nothing will its power withstand, I say

There is no deeper wave than this
Rising in the world
There is no deeper wave than this
Listen to me, girl

All the bloodshed, all the anger
All the weapons, all the greed
All the armies, all the missiles
All the symbols of our fear

There is a deeper wave than this
Rising in the world
There is a deeper wave than this
Listen to me, girl

At the still point of destruction
At the center of the fury
All the angels, all the devils
All around us, can’t you see?

There is a deeper wave than this
Rising in the land
There is a deeper wave than this
Nothing will withstand

I say love is the seventh wave

Every breath you take with me
Every breath you take, every move you make
Every cake you bake, every leg you break

Bradbury’s book people, Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, and piano music for Dracula

An update on recent activity at my newsletter that may be of interest to all my readers:

First, a few days ago I published a reflection on Eisenhower’s dire warning about the military-industrial complex and the way his words actually proved to be a prophecy about where America was headed. In this post, I suggest that in our present-day, real-world dystopian scenario, the “monastic option” that Morris Berman famously laid out in his book The Twilight of American Culture—that is, the choice to deliberately preserve and pass down to a future generation some form of knowledge or way of living that can serve as the seed of a future renaissance—seems a valid and even necessary life path to adopt. By way of illustrating the point, I refer in my post to one famous fictional example of this monastic option in action: the “book people” in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Second, just today I published a recording of my own personal piano setting of the famous opening theme from director Paul Morrisey’s Blood for Dracula, sometimes known as Andy Warhol’s Dracula, along with the story of why I love this music and how I came to create a piano version of it nearly 30 years after I first started trying:

Click on either image above to open the corresponding post.

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