My long silence on this blog has not been entirely due to laziness, I am happy to announce that my first album, Virtual Orchestra: Heavenly Light, is now released in time for Christmas, including one Christmas-themed song as track 8, an African-style take on the classic Christmas carol blended with my previous song on the nature of love.
May it entertain, uplift and inspire you to grow closer to the source of all love.
Both English and Czech subtitles are available.
The album (both as a whole and as individual tracks) is available for streaming and download at most major online music outlets:
Come see what happens when I try to recreate the music that runs through my head late at night and there are no wiser heads to tell me to tone it down a bit, observe my composition and vocal skills as well as my audio mixing deficiencies.
Of course, now that it’s released and too late to change anything, I realise that not all the tracks are as polished as the one above, so don’t feel pressured to buy the whole collection, but if people could purchase at least one track that they particularly enjoy (for only 99 cents, I might add), that would help to cover the cost of production. (I have yet to cover the costs of any of my releases, so it would make a nice change and encourage me to continue with these sorts of efforts). Over time, I will attempt to fix the issues in the less polished tracks and upload them to youtube.
My apologies for the long silence and the low quality of this production; lockdowns and heavy workloads and other factors have conspired to frustrate my efforts to produce something more worthy of those who follow my efforts, and I was restricted to using stock music instead of a commissioned accompaniment as I planned. Still, I hope at least some of you will find it enjoyable and uplifting.
Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to present Boogie Woogie Gospel, inspired by the joyful stylings of Dr K, otherwise known as Brendan Kavanagh.
Boogie Woogie Gospel
The world we live in changes with bewildering speed, With people ungrateful, hateful, jealous, bitter indeed. Well, as God is my witness, this musical business Is just the dose of joy that your soul really needs.
You don’t know me, so don’t throw me and my message away, Come up near now, so you’ll hear what I’m trying to say. Be rid of the darkness in your heart, Turn yourself around with a whole new start, And start a joyful life on this beautiful day.
A long time ago, a man played a dangerous game, Brought hope to the poor, the outcast, the sick and the lame; The corrupted elites looked down on the streets With jealous fury when the people called out His name.
He’s so holy and so wholly different from them, Bringing healing, revealing a radical change. He took their thorniest questions and evil suggestions, And wowed them with his wisdom, winning every exchange.
Embarrassed by their failure, they saw him as a deadly threat To their power and position, and so they plotted his death. They paid one of his friends to betray him, So they could take him in secret and slay him, But he used their evil plan to pay all of our debts.
He chose to be tortured and die the way that we deserved, ‘Cause he came to this world to save us, and not to be served; He offers us life abundant, where our worry and fear are redundant, Up in his Father’s house, he has our places reserved.
After everything that he’s done for all of us, I’d say he fully deserves every bit of our trust, So put your life in his hands, He’ll give you the strength to stand, And lead you faithfully to the Promised Land.
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Musical accompaniment: Boogie Woogie Bed by Audionautix, in places cut and pasted, at the end slowed
Alma Deutscher is a world-famous musical prodigy and composer, who at the age of 15 has already composed full orchestral concertos and even a full opera, with her music having being performed together with major orchestras and in major venues such as this recent performance at Carnegie Hall:
The piece is wonderful, but I found her introduction especially interesting, since it could have come straight from the Superversive Literary Movement’s mission statement:
“Some people told me that melodies are no longer acceptable in serious classical music. Because in the twenty-first century, music must reflect the ugliness of the modern world. Well, in this waltz, instead of trying to make my music artificially ugly in order to reflect the modern world, I went in exactly the opposite direction! I took some ugly sounds from the modern world, and I tried to turn them into something more beautiful through music.”
Another similar quote from almost three years earlier, when she was 12, puts it even more succinctly:
“Let me tell you a huge secret. I already know that the world is complex and can be very ugly. But I think that these people just got a little bit confused. If the world is so ugly, then what’s the point of making it even uglier with ugly music?”
The transformation of ugliness into beauty, the magical nature of beauty in art, and the desire to rebel against today’s pretentious fashionistas of foulness and lifeless drudgery with true and worthwhile art is the sign of a healthy mind and genuine artist.
A single flower poking through a crack in a vast concrete landscape, a small act of kindness in the midst of horrific war, innocence being protected from a depraved mob—each far outshines its surroundings and transforms the whole scene into something uplifting and inspiring—no wonder our intellectual jailers put so much effort into polluting, smothering and drowning out all glimpses of beauty, all glimmers of hope, all echoes of the truth, because just one breath of fresh, pure air will undo all of their work to enslave and convince the world that there is no point in resisting, nothing worthwhile to aim for, no meaning to be found in life.
That is why we as Superversives applaud Alma for her stand, and strive to create beauty, serve the truth and bring hope through our creations, whether they be poetry, prose, song, story, painting, sculpture, or any other art form.
The source of all beauty, hope, truth and love stands with us, and He is stronger than the world.
*update* found the source of the second quote and added the video
Two weeks ago, I took part in the fourth Visible Music Weekend at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Prague, in which the topic was live performances and livestreaming music performances, which culminated with a livestreamed music concert featuring songs by all of the participants in the weekend, together with some prerecorded videos, a short sermon and adverts for the two schools involved to give the live participants time to reorganize the stage between performers. The vast majority of the video is in Czech, so might not be of interest to the majority of my readers. (Some technical issues resulted in just under the first 40 seconds of the youtube video being blank). One of the prerecorded videos is a slightly tweaked version of my “Silent Night” video from several years back (21 minutes 23 seconds in), I feature in the backing choir in one song (39 minutes 37 seconds in), and my live section (starting at 56 minutes 26 seconds) is comprised of a bilingual reading of my Bohemian Advent poetry series, followed by the debut performance of a song I first wrote over a decade ago, but whose musical accompaniment was only finalised an hour before the livestream started, then finishing off with A Hope That Burns.
Through a combination of extreme nerves and no chance to rerecord things, I made a number of errors during my live performance, Over the coming weeks I will attempt to record a better quality version of Without Love, There is No Life for you all to enjoy. Here are the lyrics:
Without Love There Is No Life
(spoken)
Love is full of purity,
It shows patience and humility.
Love is not a selfish lust;
Instead, love gives a grounds for trust.
Love gives a child security,
Love gives a thing its beauty;
Because, without love there is no life. (music begins on life, the rest is sung)
Love is a many-splendoured thing.
Love gives a broken man new wings.
It perseveres, no matter what the cost;
If you have love, you’re never truly lost;
Love, seeing all my flaws,
Love, guided by higher laws;
You know, without love there is no life.
Love simply wants to hear the truth.
Love, it is not eternal youth.
Love is more than soothing noises,
‘Cause love steps up and makes hard choices.
Love lasts through the ages,
It’s written on all life’s pages.
You see, without love there is no life.
It makes the ordinary great,
Won’t mind if you are late,
Won’t leave you to your fate,
This is love.
Love puts you in harm’s way,
Though you try, you can’t always save the day;
Love is there to share your pain,
To weep and help you on your feet again,
Love is a healing flow,
Love gives you room to grow.
You know, without love there is no life.
Love looks you in the face;
Love helps you find your place.
With love, you can forgive the past,
Move on and build a peace to really last.
Love is where you find your worth;
If you’re loved, you’re more precious than the Earth.
You see, without love there is no life.
It shows you you belong,
It admits when it is wrong,
It’s majestic and it’s strong,
This is love.
But love is not every time returned,
Love is not something you have earned,
Sometimes our care isn’t even prized;
Instead our thoughts are utterly despised.
True love goes on caring anyway,
Even when we walk the other way;
It knows that without love there is no life.
Love is how your soul can truly shine,
Through love I am yours and you are mine,
Love expressed is such an open book,
A life of love is worth a closer look,
Can it be, that here is love for me?
Come explore this greatest mystery,
And see that without love there is no life.
Listening to music can be therapeutic, soothing, invigorating, inspiring, heartbreaking, or depressing, much like reading or listening to a story. In fact Hans Zimmer once said that in all the music he composes his primary purpose is to tell a story, despite using no words. Listening to one of his most famous pieces (that accompanies one of the great movie endings of all time) inspired this little effort of mine below. In Zimmer’s piece, and the film, the hero is faced with a situation where all seems lost. He did everything he could, but all he has worked for has crumbled to dust before his eyes. He sees the situation for what it is, absorbs this devastating news, and yet he still finds the strength to keep going, even to sacrifice himself and his reputation to save people he will never meet, who will almost certainly never even know, let alone appreciate, what he did for them. He is able to do it quickly this time, because he’s done it before. In these respects, these few minutes are a microcosm of his entire heroic journey.
As the piece played I was struck by the ways in which it mirrored some of my own experiences (except it took me far longer to gather up the strength to keep going, and my behaviour has been far less heroic). It encourages me to keep going, to do better, to come closer to the good example set.
This is the power of story, of archetypes, of strong heroic characters, of good examples. Let us make more of them.
My piece set to Zimmer’s music can be found here, with the lyrics below that
I have known…
I have known despair, and I will not promote it.
I have known pain, and I will not glorify it.
I have known false hope, and I will not encourage it.
I have known cowardice, and I will understand, but not praise it.
I have known self-loathing, and I will not romanticize it.
I have known brokenness, defeat, lostness, and yet emerged on the other side, not unscathed, but grown.
I have known failure, and I will learn from it.
I will defend the truth.
I will not abandon my allies.
I will keep learning, and admit when I am wrong.
I will advocate for genuine hope.
I will praise and strive to create beauty.
I will call for courage in matters great and small.
I will seek to repair the damage I have caused.
I will seek to restore friendships.
I will console those who suffer.
I will encourage those who feel they can’t go on, for I have walked that path.
The Zwyckyverse 