6/14/06

Song: Fullness of Wind (Part (i) of "Three Variations on the Canon in D Major by Johann Pachelbel")
Artist: Brian Eno after Johann Pachebel
Source: Discreet Music
Day: 6/14/06

My grandma died early in the morning on 6/14/06. I didn't really set out to have a song or post related to that, in fact I avoided albums that seemed like the obvious choices. Art can help throw our lives and emotions into perspecitve but it can also give them a roteness that I wanted to avoid. I didn't want to play a song to make me sad or whatever just because that's what I am supposed to feel at times like this. I want to just feel how I am feeling, or at least sort it out without trying to shoehorn it into 5 stages.

But perhaps it is unavoidable that things would have some resonance. It was more a desire to listen to something quiet and neutral that caused me to pull my copy of Descreet Music off the shelf yesterday, but somehow this song fit. I've always been a sucker for what I know as the Pachebel Canon. I can remember my mom (this grandma's daughter) playing the record for me when I was a kid and just really liking the melody and the grand, loping rhythm. This is the remix by Brian Eno on his pre-Ambient ambient album. He took the score and tinkered with it and gave it to musicians to play and recorded the results. In this variation, the fragments they play change speeds at different rates so they come in and out of phase. The canon is recognizable but it comes out in this interesting post-Steve Reich form: a slightly sappy, beautiful, grandiose and perhaps-a-touch-sad Renaissance (?) sensibility filtered through a modernist one. Which as I have finished typing this I realize is a good descriptor of my mood yesterday, for better or for worse.

P.S. I am not sure what my grandma would think. I never knew her tastes that well. Although she came from family with music in it (her dad was a choir director), I don't get the feeling it was something she focused on much. She and my grandpa had a turntable and later a CD player, but it was hardly used when I was there. (She did take pride in fact that my mom and my aunts knew her tastes and gave her CDs that she liked.) I know she liked crooners and classical classics so she probably would have appreciated the canon in its original form. I doubt she would have had much time for Eno's feeding it through his "self-regulating and self generating" system. She had an honest sweetness about her that didn't really notice or care about serious art's views of sentimentality, so Eno's experiment, interesting as it is, would probably have been beside the point for her.