This months composer’s choice is an exploration of choral music. I was keen to layer a polyphony of ‘voices’ loosely based and hardly recognisable on the chord structure of the Righteous Brother’s Unchained Melody. Not that I was feeling particularly righteous.
But I was thinking, that Unchained Melody reminded me of George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord and then the penny dropped: Nya Ha ! Both songs are prayers and there was my choral “devotional music “ connection.
Major Key – Major Lift
Everyone knows that Unchained Melody is a song of longing, deep, deep, longing. The way its delivered is clearly a love song for union with one’s beloved but it also doesn’t take much of a shift, to sing it as a prayer, seeking union with one’s sense of the Divine. A sense that one’s true home is Unity:
Lonely rivers flow to the sea, to the sea
To the open arms of the sea
Yes, lonely rivers sigh, “Wait for me, wait for me
I’ll be coming home, wait for me”
And then it just takes a comma after “God” to shift the focus of the song to missing one’s lover, to a direct statement to the Divine “speed your love to me”.
I need your love
I need your love
God, speed your love to me
George Harrison just jumps straight in and doesn’t blur the edges and sings a direct song to the Divine:
I really want to see you
Really want to be with you
Really want to see you, Lord
But it takes so long, my Lord
Once again the longing for union. It takes so long.
What is this sense that we have missed the boat and are longing for re-union? We feel it in our chest like love sickness. And why do humans put so much effort making music composed with the intent of reaching out to the Divine? It is like we are stranded and sending out a rescue beacon to the cosmos…
Well then, keep transmitting!
Steve
Stephen Fearnley is an award-winning filmmaker, artist and composer. He composes transformational soundscapes for the journeys of One Mind Live – a unique worldwide online group meditation community. To sample One Mind Live, go HERE