Here is a sample chapter from my rough draft to give you an idea of how this nonsense is progressing.
Canto 25 – Wish Upon a Star
I honestly was just minding my own business. The bar, I mean. I was minding the bar. Ugly Bill and his idiot child were talking to the FBI somewhere they didn’t bother to inform me about. Orgus, Bill’s truck-driving uglier son was in the hospital. And my brother Richard was home in front of the TV pretending to be sick or something. It was just me, Captain Noah Dettbarn, and an amazing number of unwashed glasses in a business that hardly ever had customers enough to get multiple glasses dirty.
The Captain was busy with his one and only bottle for the day, probably thinking about the South Seas Islands where he used to go by cargo ship. A place where palm trees swayed in the breeze and tropical girls danced in grass skirts with no tops on. I envied his memories. So much more colorful than small-town Iowa in October. Why did it always seem to be October in Iowa, anyway? Sweater weather and cold snaps and early frost.
But my regrets and glass-washing were interrupted by the whole gaggle of Norwall Pirates coming into the bar where they really weren’t supposed to be.
Billy was leading the way, followed by that danged Ricky kid. I knew he would be back. And Francois and little silent black kid and then the two girls, Mary and Val.
“Ricky wants to try the singing machine,” Billy said. “Would that be okay? Please?”
I glared at them all. “What have I got to lose? The instruction book is on top of it. And if Ricky breaks it, Ricky’s daddy the cop has to pay for it.”
Ricky grinned at me. “You know he don’t have no money, right?”
So, like a flock of pigeons or a gaggle of geese they circled around the clunky Japanese squawker box and started chirping and arguing and other things that were hard to ignore. I couldn’t help but notice how pretty young Valerie really was. Even in baggy Fall clothes, she had a body and face that were going to take her far in life and going to break more than one heart. I wondered if she was in any danger from the Teddy Bear Killer that Ugly Bill was going to help capture. Of course, I knew the pervert only killed boys. Still, I had to wonder.
“So that’s what you have to do,” Billy was explaining from the manual. “And now all you have to do is pick one, put the number in, and sing.”
“I try first!” Sang out Ricky.
“Don’t you wanna let the deaf kid sing first?” I asked. “I have never heard his voice.”
“Uncle Victor, you know he can’t speak except in sign language.” Billy was glaring back at me. That skinny little hairball on stick legs was trying to correct my social skills. Nuts to that. I ate a few more antacid tablets.
“That would be perfect for me,” I grumbled to myself.
“Here’s the one I want,” Ricky declared, “Steppenwolf, Born to be Wild.”
Billy helped him type in the right series of numbers, then the screeching began.
“Get your motor running…!” he bellowed like a moose during mating season. “Head out on the highway…”
I regretted not buying earplugs when I bought the damned karaoke thingy. I regretted it almost as much as not being on a South Sea island with girls in grass skirts and no tops.
“Looking for adventure…!” I started fixating on counting the bar glasses on the counter behind me, anything but listening to that moose-mating noise pollution. I also re-stacked the coasters and cleaned the peanut bowls. I successfully refocused my attention to totally ignore Ricky destroying that song.
“Oh, gawd! I only get twenty-five percent on that score? I thought I sang better than that!”
“That was pretty awful, Rick,” Valerie said diplomatically.
Ricky looked angry, but everybody else was nodding agreement. So, the kid gave up and pressed the microphone into Francois’s hand. The French boy entered a code surprisingly quickly.
“When you wish upon a star…”
My beloved Jesus! It was electrifyingly good right from the very first note.
“Makes no difference who you are…”
They were all listening with their mouths open.
“Anything your heart desires… will come to you…”
Even the Captain was listening. I swear I saw tears in his old red eyes.
“If your heart is in your dreams… no request is too extreme…”
I couldn’t help but think about how depressed this kid had been since I brought him here. He’d lost his whole family. He’d been in the back seat of the car with them when they had died. He’d been sleeping hour after hour at our house because he was too sad to do anything but dream. And here he was putting his whole soul into a song about dreams and wishes and stars… and I… um… I was about to cry too when he hit that last long beautiful note.
The song ended, and everyone was stunned. The machine put fireworks on the screen and scored him one hundred percent.
“Sing it again,” said Valerie, softly. It was the only thing anyone could say. And then he sang it again, just as amazingly beautiful as the first time. And he scored one hundred again. Everyone was sniffling or openly crying because it was so touching. Especially pretty little Valerie who had lost her own father only a couple of years ago. Her cheeks were dripping wet.
“Vicar, you gotta have him sing that again tonight,” said the Captain. “People have got to hear that. I mean… gawd dang! That was amazing! I gotta bring folks here to hear that.”
And I knew he was right. That was not something we could afford to keep to ourselves. That kid had real talent.
Toccata and Fugue in D Minor
Johann Sebastian Bach may or may not have written his organ masterpiece, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor in 1704. All we know for sure is that the combined efforts of Johannes Ringk, who saved it in manuscript form in the 1830’s, and Felix Mendelssohn who performed it and made it a hit you could dance to during the Bach Revival in 1840 made it possible to still hear its sublime music today. Okay, maybe not dance to exactly… But without the two of them, the piece might have been lost to us in obscurity.
The Toccata part is a composition that uses fast fingerings and a sprightly beat to make happy hippie type music that is really quite trippy. The Fugue part (pronounced Fyoog, not Fuggwee which I learned to my horror in grade school music class) is a part where one part of the tune echoes another part of the tune and one part becomes the other part and then reflects it all back again. I know that’s needlessly confusing, but at least I know what I mean. That is not always a given when I am writing quickly like a Toccata.
I have posted two different versions for you to listen to in this musical metaphor nonsensical posticle… err… Popsicle… err… maybe just post. One is the kinda creepy organ version like you might find in a Hammer Films monster movie in the 1970’s. The other is the light and fluffy violin version from Disney’s Fantasia. I don’t really expect you to listen to both, but listening to one or the other would at least give you a tonal hint about what the ever-loving foolishness I am writing in this post is really all about.
You see, I find sober thoughts in this 313-year-old piece of music that I apply to the arc of my life to give it meaning in musical measure.
This is the Paffooney of this piece, a picture of my wife in her cartoon panda incarnation, along with the panda persona of my number two son. The background of this Paffooney is the actual Ringk manuscript that allowed Bach’s masterwork not to be lost for all time.
My life was always a musical composition, though I never really learned piano other than to pick out favorite tunes by ear. But the Bach Toccata and Fugue begins thusly;
The Toccata begins with a single-voice flourish in the upper ranges of the keyboard, doubled at the octave. It then spirals toward the bottom, where a diminished seventh chord appears (which actually implies a dominant chord with a minor 9th against a tonic pedal), built one note at a time. This resolves into a D major chord.
I interpret that in prose thusly;
Life was bright and full of promise when I was a child… men going to the moon, me learning to draw and paint, and being smarter than the average child to the point of being hated for my smart-asserry and tortured accordingly. I was sexually assaulted by an older boy and spiraled towards the bottom where I was diminished for a time and mired in a seventh chord of depression and despair. But that resolved into a D major chord when the realization dawned that I could teach and help others to learn the music of life.
And then the Fugue begins in earnest. I set the melody and led my students to repeat and reflect it back again. Over and over, rising like a storm and skipping like a happy child through the tulips that blossom as the showers pass. Winding and unwinding in equal measure, my life progressed to a creaky old age. But the notes of regret in the conclusion are few. The reflections of happinesses gained are legion. I have lived a life I do not regret. I may not have my music saved in the same way Johann Sebastian did, but I am proud of the whole of it. And whether by organ or by violin, it will translate to the next life, and will continue to repeat. What more can a doofus who thinks teaching and drawing and telling stories are a form of music ask for from life?
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Tagged as classical music, Fugue, happiness, happiness to the point of stupidity, J S Bach, life lessons, music, rants, testing, Toccata