My Love is like a Winter rose
That sweetly blooms alone,
That has of rivals none, and knows
A beauty all her own.My Love is like a tender tune
That wakens tender words,
And fills December full of June,
And brings again the birds.Her smile, my sun; her voice, my song;
‘A Song’s Echo’ by Frank Dempster Sherman
Her face, my flower of bliss;
Oh, who could find the Winter long
With such a Love as this!
(kind of, haha.)
Something a bit different though; I filmed myself making a little game music track on Logic:
“Come again, sweet love doth now invite” is a song with music John Dowland, anonymous lyrics. This is not that song. That is a great song though–very over the top sad and also very cute and catchy! This is music I wrote for those same lyrics.
Come again!
Sweet love doth now invite
Thy graces that refrain
To do me due delight,
To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die,
With thee again in sweetest sympathy.Come again!
That I may cease to mourn
Through thy unkind disdain;
For now left and forlorn
I sit, I sigh, I weep, I faint, I die
In deadly pain and endless misery.All the night
My sleeps are full of dreams,
My eyes are full of streams.
My heart takes no delight
Her smiles, my springs that makes my joys to grow,
Her frowns the Winters of my woe.Out alas,
My faith is ever true,
Yet will she never rue
Nor yield me any grace;
Her eyes of fire, her heart of flint is made,
Whom neither tears nor truth may once persuade.
The first of a bit of a project of setting old/Elizabethan era lyrics/poetry to music…
Dowland, and others of the era, but Dowland was RENOWNED for it, wrote such enjoyably, beautifully, over-the-top melancholy tragic songs. This was super trendy and they were really POPULAR.
So, if there’s a concept here, it’s that I’m setting the words with the same kind of melancholy and sincerity despite their excessiveness, but in a more modern folk-pop-idk idiom, a sort of parallel.
I did a quick transcription of another pretty piece from the Final Fantasy VII remake. This piece is by Takafumi Imamura, using themes by Nobuo Uematsu from the original game (Main Theme and Holding Thoughts In My Heart). And I played it on piano and oboe 🙂
Home away from home (in Bb) score on musescore
A contest entry! The brief was to write an “I want” type musical song.
This song is sung by someone from a place that’s become a kind of decayed kingdom or a two-bit town, living off pity tourism and old memories.  But she genuinely loves her home and really wants to restore it to its former splendour, and she’s about to set off on her own to do that. It does appear that she’s very very okay if not downright keen to use unscrupulous means to do it, incidentally.  She also has some big issues of feeling inadequate and unwanted and like she can never live up to her dead mother… just by the by.
I DUNNO, it’s sweet and soaring and pretty morally ambiguous and I really wonder where this character would go in the rest of a musical…..
Everybody leaves and nothing ever changes
But that’s not gonna be me
I know this place in my bones, we’re the same
We are worth so much more than what they seeI’ve been raised on stories of the old days
How we used to have some pride
People say we can’t bring back the old days
But I don’t think they’ve really triedTo bring us glory, glory
When everyone knows your name and where you came from
I want to bring us glory, glory
And then we’ll see we’ve nothing to be ashamed of
We’ll scrub up nice, you’ll see, this place and me
I’ll get us on the right track
And so I’m leaving too, but one day soon I’ll be backDon’t tell me I’m too young
Don’t tell me to be patient
Curtsying and politics, I can barely stay awake
We’ve been on our knees too long
A bowed and broken nation
Enough begging and borrowing, it’s high time that we take
Take it back
I’ll do something spectacular…Oh glory, glory
Everyone will know my name and where I came from
I’ll bring us glory, glory
The world will see we’ve nothing to be ashamed of
We’ll scrub up nice, you’ll see, you and me
We’ll show them what we can do
And you’ll be proud of me, and I’ll be proud of youSo I can’t sit still
So I never fit in
They don’t want me here, but I’ll show them
If I can’t be your princess, I’ll be an outlaw queen
I’m doing for this for you, I don’t owe them—
And yes I know, Dad, I can never be what Mother was
But maybe I can still earn your respect becauseI’ll bring you glory, glory
Everyone will know my name and where I came from
I’ll rewrite our story
And then you’ll see we’ve nothing to be ashamed of
We’ll scrub up nice, you’ll see, this place and me
And after all we’ve been through
You’ll be proud of me
Yes you’ll be proud of me
And you will love me
Like I’ve always loved you