Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Musical Euphoria

For a long while, my life has been having like crazy currents running under seemingly still water. I always have an interest for music in general, but it was about a year ago that the interest leads me into something deeper: Singing. It's a mean to vent my frustrations. Even so, it seemed that it's beginning to lose it's effect... until I just reached another level.

Recently fell in love with a song by Jay Zhou's 说了再见. Been hunting around for any traces of music that resonates with what's going on inside me, but for most of the time, it's hard to find an exact match. Earlier on, I managed to find the piano solo version of that song on youtube. That's when I realised what I've forgotten all these while. In a song, there are the lyrics, the melody and the vocal/s. The former tells the story of the song. The latter expresses/interprets the story of the song by using vocal techniques to enhance the story-telling process. If we take out the former and the latter, it leaves us with the melody, for us to plug our own meaning... and even lyrics into the song, to make it "our song". Back to the example I've given, 说了再见 is a song interpreted by Jay Zhou. It's his story, his song. But after listening to quite sometime, I get this feeling that I would like to have my own version of the story too, even though the story might not be completely relevant to the original lyrics or interpreted in the same way as the original artis/producer wants it to be.

Quote another example. Canon in D by Pachelbel. It was commonly used as a wedding theme. But in an old advertisement by Pantene, the very same music was used as the underlying theme... to tell the story of a young deaf gal who went through to much hardships and faced discrimination to participate and win a classic recital competition. The music was thus interpreted as akin to narrating the butterfly slowly breaking free from it's cocoon, away from its previously unassuming form.

Guess I'll be loading my ipod with the instrumental pieces soon enough.

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