Musings . . . Stephen Hopkins

I've been waiting a good long while for the weather to change back to fall--not that I've minded the glorious summery weather we've been experiencing until just a couple of days ago. But this next track from Meditations in Blue, "Windfall," is suggestive of a windy, overcast fall day. I went with the one-word title (rather than "Wind Fall") because the piece was something of a windfall for me. Several ideas I had--three, actually--just fell together one day. And it wasn't until much later that I realized there were really only two different ideas.

Here's track 7 from Meditations in Blue:

Windfall

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Ah, pleasure! Debussy eventually declared it was his sole guiding aesthetic, and it's hard to argue with the results. Indeed, why do we listen to music other than to derive pleasure from the experience? (Schoenberg, on the other hand, would have a few things to say about truth--and that's not always pretty.)

So, I had this dream, oh, seven or eight years ago . . . I heard a woman's voice singing, "I want to pleasure you still." Let me tell you, I woke up and wrote that down! And then I found the entire tune, built it around that opening line. And here it is, "Pleasure," track 8 on Meditations in Blue. SH

Pleasure

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