Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Spent the day prepping for Bob and Tom's wedding, which for me was going to mean composing something on flute, then preparing to play it as they walk down the aisle this weekend... until Bob called last night, to invite us to the rehearsal dinner tomorrow night, and by way of a suggestion Darcie hummed him a melody I already play -- the stolen Bach bit from David Wilcox's Burgundy Heart-Shaped Medallion -- and he liked it, and we decided to go with it.

Thank the gods for Darcie's thoughtfulness. Composition was a big fat weight on my head; Polish and performance I can do with both lungs tied behind my back.

But the unseen and unplanned is a Zen Koan: how long is a procession? What if the procession lasted longer than I thought?

I decided to add the rest of Wilcox's original, to make it longer. The processional piece, with this addition, felt almost, but not quite, long enough.

So I went looking for inspiration, which in this day and age is spelled G-O-O-G-L-E.

Inspiration today turned out to be a process primarily comprised of fruitless hours online trying to track down the original Bach piece, in the hopes that, were the procession to run longer than 1:43, there was more to it than the bit Wilcox uses. Wilcox does not attribute the song on his album or webpages beyond Bach's name, and a search of the obvious keywords [bach burgundy medallion wilcox] got hits, but no citation. A sift-through of classical MIDI collections seemed a bit like looking for a record needle in a haystack. Found an interview in which Wilcox cites the source as Bach's Well Tempered Clavier, but after listening to snippets of pretty much every one of the fortysomething movements, I decided this wasn't going to happen.

Found some crazy-neat stuff on the way, though -- multimedia which strained the hazy fugues and metered memories of prep school AP Music Theory class. Those interested in the synchronistic possibilities of and for hypertext and music, Bach lovers with any smattering of theory or formal musicianship, and teachers of music appreciation and music theory really should check this full-blown "study" of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier out; the shockwave deconstruction modules of each fugue are masterpieces of music study.

We put the words to Burgundy Heart-Shaped Medallion in the wedding scrapbook Darcie's been working on all day (while I was stressing about music and not really making much). They seem relevant, I guess, and hopefully stabilizing: in my head, I'll be singing them to stay calm while a bunch of strangers watch me play the groom and groom down the center aisle.