Monday, July 18, 2011

AD- Ooh, Shiny!

I’m fairly certain I have ADHD – or, as a friend taught me to prefer calling it, ADOS (Attention Deficit – ooh, shiny!).

One of the things that most helps me to make sense of the rapid-fire thoughts in my brain is writing. Although I cannot string together five coherent thoughts in my brain, I can keep track of five coherent sentences (if only because I can reread what I’ve just written). Parentheses and dashes figure prominently, if only so I can interject – wait, I was supposed to put some crazy random idea there, but honestly the trees outside aren’t that random and attempts to write a stream of consciousness have generally been disastrous.

If there were a god of ADHD, it would surely be Mercury, the ever-changeable god of thieves, travel, and messages. And sometimes medicine. And pranks. And athletes. You get the idea. Mercury, the origin of the word for "mercurial", unpredictability, and the element once known as quicksilver...

Quicksilver-thoughts
Droplets rolling, roiling, pairing, parting
Never-still never-same – patterning poorly
Irregular, unexpected
Interjected
Accepted, rejected, undetected
Beautiful impossible shiny fishes slithering away
Flipping flippantly fluidly ungraspably
How does one order?
How can one make them line up straight and neat
Like iambs marching meekly in a row,
Not one undone, not one left incomplete
Each clearly placed just where it ought to go?
How does one trim the tangled skein of knots
To show a web of tidy tied-up thoughts?
And then the volta's early, out of place
Throwing off the rhythm and the rhyme
Uncertainty comes running on apace
Off-kiltering the slightly twisted line
The yarn unravels, raveled at the ends
Fibers fraying every which-a-way
The rhythm falters, breaking as it expends
Fails the ordering, all thought gone astray.
Empty
Gone
Ashes, dust, decay
Order drives quicksilver thought away.

That poem, by the way, makes more sense if you’re familiar with the sonnet form. (English teacher here; English class is, at least, good for helping you understand an English teacher’s metaphors!) The lines in between “How does one order?” and “Empty” are a warped sonnet. A classic sonnet is fourteen lines, each line in iambic pentameter (iamb: da-DUM beat; pentameter: five such beats) and following a fairly rigid rhyme scheme (multiple options here). The two most popular sonnet forms, Petrarchan and Shakespearean, both usually have a volta, or switch in tone, toward the end. The volta is usually after the eighth line or twelfth…

I miss the classroom.

This is why I’m a teacher, employed or not. I find this stuff so incredibly interesting, I can go on for ages.

And I adore sonnets. It’s doubtful I’ll ever consider myself a poet, but the organization of thought is wonderful.

And this whole post I’m typing in Word in my car on the way home, and I’ll probably edit it heavily before posting, but sometimes… sometimes it’s necessary to think out on paper. Even if thoughts come in ADHD-disorganized fashion. Squirrel!

Note: Didn't end up heavily edited at all. Although I did do a bit of fact checking; on what, I dare not reveal. ;)

Thursday, July 07, 2011

The Magic Chord Progression

This is a real digression from my usual blog topics, and given my readership (limited, I believe, to various friends and relatives countable on fingers and toes) I'm unlikely to get any useful new info, but hey...

I love playing around with music. I've even written a song or two. And yes, most popular music is very limited in chord structure. (Have I scared you with the words "chord structure"? It will get more technical. Perhaps now is the time to bail out.) Most songs use the same three or four chords in any of the dozen different major keys. Being a keyboardist first and foremost, I tend to think of them in the key of C: C, F, G, maybe some Am or Em action, D7 if you want some variety... but you can get a lot of mileage out of just C, F, and G if you can get the song in that key.

Despite the fact that there are only a few chords, however, the potential variety of chord progressions is pretty good. "Rock Around The Clock" has F C G and a final resolve to C on its famous chorus (averaging to one chord per line - and yes, I transposed it), while "Blowin' In The Wind" just repeats CFGCFGCFG on its verses... I'm sure that there's a technical term in music theory for these patterns, but the point is, same chords do not equal same chord structure. Same chord structure is much rarer.

I don't know when I first noticed the magic chord progression, but it was some time before I wrote my first proper song. In Roman numeral notation, it goes vi-IV-I-V - in the key of C, it comes out A minor - F major - C major - G major. And it's my theory that songs with this progression are inclined to Awesome.

It's in the chorus of "All You Wanted". It's in the whole dang song "Save Tonight".  It's in the verse of "Lord Have Mercy". It's in the chorus of "My Savior My God" and "Defying Gravity". It's in the chorus of "Our God" and "Better Than A Hallelujah" and "One Of Us".

The feeling is just one of moving from smallness to greatness, wavering between pain and indescribable joy. And I love it.

So, if I have any readers with whom I have not discussed this ad nauseum in real life: can you think of any others? And can you think of any which somehow fail the Awesome criterion (except possibly on the basis of lyrics)?

ETA: How could I have forgotten "Save Tonight"???