2024-03-18 (Week 2311): The Calm After the Storm
It’s taken a long time to get here, but I’ve finally finished a new piece of music, “The Calm After the Storm.” I uploaded it to DistroKid last week, and the official release date is Friday, April 12th.
I waited close to a month to release the single because, first, I remembered from the last time I uploaded music to the streaming services that they required that much lead time to distribute everything.
It’s not entirely new, as I used the music from my earlier work, “A Calming Influence,” and streamlined it a bit more. I also transposed it from A Flat Major to B Minor, which feels more fitting.
According to Schubart’s “Emotions of the Musical Keys,” A Flat Major is the key of the grave, which was definitely inappropriate for the piece. B Minor is the key to patience and calm, as well as awaiting divine dispensation.
I’m not sure of my motivations from 21 years ago, as it also reminds me of “The Eternal Castle Britannia” from the Ultima: Exodus soundtrack for the NES, which I played a lot. I also wrote a review of the game for a much earlier incarnation of this site and have covered the “Battle” theme and the “The Enigma of Ambrosia” theme.
My point in revisiting it is that the opening arpeggio has been with me for many years, and arpeggios are my favorite musical form. It likely stems from the many hours I put into Final Fantasy for the NES and every time I turned the game on; I would hear the “The Prelude” theme.
That love for arpeggios and Ultima: Exodus also ties together, as I purchased a cartridge of Ultima: Exodus and a CD of Burzum’s “Filosofem” in February 1999. I would turn the sound down on the game while turning the CD up.
The opening, hypnotic arpeggios in “Dunkelheit” (I have the German edition) helped me to immerse myself in the world of Sosaria further than the Ultima: Exodus game presents. I understand that the creator of Burzum has some very questionable views on things, but the music has a footprint of its own.
For the cover art, I used a grainy picture I took from a trip to Netarts, OR (Cape Lookout specifically) in July 1999. It was a place of calming influence during a rather turbulent time. 1999 saw me dealing with depression, heartbreak, and stressing myself out by trying to do too many things at once.
Netarts has always been a place of peace for me. Cape Meares State Scenic Viewpoint, in particular, which I last visited in August 2022 (the one week in the last two years that I didn’t write a blog), is where I can stare off into the ocean and find real peace.
2024 finds me where the storms of youth have subsided, and I can continue calmly into my remaining years (however many there are). It speaks to the idea of Vanaprastha that I’ve recently discovered (and written about multiple times), that I am in the third stage of life, and things have stabilized.
I plan to write a more detailed article for Medium when the single is closer to release, as I still have some more thoughts I want to gather about the concept itself. This blog entry is more about how I got here.
One more thing I want to touch on before I go is that the way the piece sounds (and the font of the artwork) reminds me of two pieces I made in 2015, “As the Sun Rises” and “Reaching to the Sky.” They both use just intonation, which Sevish (a prolific just intonation composer) found rather agreeable.
In any event, that’s all I’ve got for this week, and I apologize for all the links. That said, you don’t have to click them.
Until next week!
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