One chord

For my first ever post on this blog, which is going to be devoted to music that I love, I'd like to start with one of the pieces that first captivated me.

When I was five or six, a family friend from up the street gave us an LP of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. I had no idea what they were singing about, but this music utterly transfixed me.

I listened to it so many times that eventually I could play the whole thing through in my head from memory (carefully observing the correct number of repeats!). When I say "in my head," this usually involved some form of vocalisation as well... my brother likes to recount how I sometimes kept him awake at night with my "orchestra noises!" I also wanted to join in with the recording, and would spend happy afternoons assembling my own percussion section from saucepans, laundry buckets and other household objects so I could play along. And to this day, I still think Carmina Burana has the best ever percussion parts!

But as much as I have always loved the "loud bits", nowadays my favourite moment in the score is this...

It doesn't seem like much, but that is one of my favourite chords ever. The soft, low strings, with muted horns and a bass clarinet for some subtle added depth. And then the celesta, oboes and piccolos to ping out the same chord, softly, two octaves up.

And what's the baritone singing about? "Day, night and everything is against me, the chattering of maidens makes me weep." This is the chord on "makes me weep". How appropriate.

There are heaps of brilliantly orchestrated chords out there. This is just one of them. But I like it a lot.

I have always liked music, ever since Dad (apparently) played Mahler to me in the cot. But something about Carmina Burana really got me deep down and excited me as nothing had before. Yet that was only the beginning. There was so much more beautiful music I was still to discover!