More of today's work was on 'The Light Bulb 1', a complex song in five parts. Part 1 is a simple melody in electric piano which emerges from a background sound of a record player and some sine waves. The scene takes place inside a light bulb, so the sounds are designed to paint this.
The music changes into more drama, and some ascending notes. Yesterday these were wide string chords, but today I worked on making these into a staircase of strings (in the mode of Handel), but changed these into a live piano instead. This introduction is about reminiscence.
These then switch into a deeper analysis, and here the warm strings appear, with a bass drum, but this collapses into stabbed piano chords as the filament of the light bulb is torn apart; before finally the last part revives the first, as we look at the broken bulb.
There are many challenges here, partly the transitions between parts, but also in painting images efficiently and clearly.
I listened to The Dreaming again last night, Kate Bush's best album (though closely followed by The Hounds of Love). This scene painting is my goal too. Her genius, and a large team, took two years to create it, and I'm almost moving to the stage where my albums are taking a year each. I should be grateful to creep forwards in micro steps, as I have today.
Meanwhile, America as a country and empire is disintegrating. The slight effects evident now are nothing compared to the huge effects which will be evident in a year, two years. The world may enter a new 'great depression' economically, or engage in new, needless wars, for no gain. All of this is more than the work of Donald Trump. About half of Americans, and a huge percentage of politicians agree with his completely wrong ideas and ignorant political philosophy. This then is partly a failure of democracy and political education. The most democratic country in the world voted to destroy itself, largely though ignorance, and partly though deception and a breakdown of trust. Nobody really knew what Donald Trump would do, but trusted that the systems of government would prevent him from doing much harm. Those people were wrong, but perhaps even now a majority are too blind to realise the harm being done.
America has a 'right to bear arms'. I presumed that this was an implicit right to use those arms to attack tyranny; that the right to bear arms was a right to kill tyrants. Perhaps it's merely a right to own weapons, but not a right to use them, which seems somewhat pointless (if sensible). Either way; this right was one failsafe of the democratic government against tyranny. Another failsafe was the right to free speech, but now 90% of America's media is controlled by about 6 huge corporations, all of which are espousing the same rhetoric of compliance with the government, due to coercions made by it. Emotional pressure is so hard to define in laws, and in constituions.
The first step of holding a government to account is knowing when they are doing wrong. One area where America excels is political awareness, in people's belief in and knowledge of their written constituion, but many areas of politics, in many countries, remain a mystery to so many of its people. Not knowing, or not caring, about how civilisation works is a dangerous decadence.
