Back to work after my break, which included a trip to Glastonbury Tor, the town, the Arnolfini and the rocks near Clifton Suspension Bridge.
Have been busy today working on music. It's amazing how many changes can be needed to songs which were, a few days ago, thought of as finished. I've added some chords and quite a lot of balancing work to The Girl with the Pearl Earring, and added some chorus to the vocals in an homage to Pet Shop Boys which made me smile.
I changed the harpsichord in Girl Reading a Letter for a better one, like the one used in Autumn's Shadow, and added some more to Rembrandt, and tried to add more drama there with guitars, but more layers didn't seem to help things. Then, more work on Welcome to My Gallery, which is something of an epic in 3-minutes.
While away, I thought about Program Music vs. Romantic Music, and the applications to pop/rock. So-called program music is structured, as with Beethoven and earlier, and Romantic music less structured to evoke a mood. To some extent, feeling comes from breaking tempo and form, so this makes sense. Prog Rock is perhaps closer to Program music, in that it aims for large structures (well, my music does, with albums like Nightfood, and generally progressive albums have an overall feeling or unity, if only because the same instruments are used on very long tracks which evoke classical movements). Pop songs are somewhat Romantic though... because they're short pieces that are not related to others on an album, but there are many crossovers, as songs are typically very structured with verses/choruses, and lots of rhyme and simplistic poetic structures. There are very few completely open songs (our Fall in Green music is closer than most). And, of course, even in Beethoven's day, he wouldn't have recognised a distinction between Program and Romantic, as his music was generally structured, and the emotions came from breaking or defining those structures.
I can see that The Beatles started with short and highly structured songs, and gradually broke these up, but whole albums weren't particularly structured. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is often cited as an early 'concept album', yet it's broadly a collection of any-old song bracketed with a start and end, rather than structured in any musically meaningful way.
