Frontotemporal Dementia In The Morning
I walk in a maze and I talk in a daze… This morning involved waking up at the not very reasonable hour of 0415 in order to ship my girlfriend off to the bus station. Five hours to NYC, five hours back again with an ETA of about 1am. Driving back up again at that infidelic hour, watching the recycling trucks doing their duty in the not quite dawn, the radio was cranking out mad choonz: in this particular case, Bolero. This did not seem appropriate back then in the grey! Bolero is not morning music.
In fact, Bolero is surprisingly not very classical sounding. It’s one of the few pieces which has a serious beat to it. I totally had not noticed this until blearily navigating back over the bridge this morning. Perhaps this is why it was one of the first classical pieces I remember having a bit of thing for, back in the heady days of primary school. One of our teachers (Mrs. Cook, I think. She was old and people were scared of her) liked to play something culturally significant when we were marching into assembly on Wednesdays. This one time she picked Bolero, and I distinctly remember her remark about how we were all marching in on that ante m., and also memorizing the name of the piece because I thought it was cool. That was… errr…. (calculate calculate) about twenty years ago. Good god I’m getting old and scary myself.
That made me start thinking about twentieth century music in general, and why it is particularly appealing to me, and whether that might be in part due to an increased use of percussion. Is there in fact an increased use of percussion? It’s something that I’ve never really been listening for, up until now with Bolero’s sneaky little suggestions in that direction. I’ll be keeping my ears open in a specific way for a bit from now on.
Tags: bolero, classical music