MUSICAL BYTES

If a picture is worth a thousand words then a video must be worth a million!

And furthermore ...

If writing is about putting down on paper what you know then lyrics for a singer are a place to start. One type of music in my childhood was what came out of our kitchen radio. The dial was always set to one station - CJIB radio Vernon, B.C. Looking back I see that the music was all Country & Western. Well ... that was just the way it was!

The man who wrote this song* had my father in mind. Whenever my mother lamented the cedar shakes coming off the house or a pipe leaking my father would respond with this ditty (the one and only that he knew):

* From Wikipedia, this piece of music is "a popular song by Stuart Hamblen published in 1954. It describes a house in a state of disrepair after its owner's death, and was inspired by a real-life house found by Hamblen and his friends while on a fishing trip... Hamblen intended this to symbolize the joy of the man's going to Heaven", i.e. it's basically a gospel song!

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There are numerous ways to create music! At this particular point in my life it comes from playing the piano. It is (but doesn't necessarily have to be) a solitary activity where one can lose oneself in the music and often, all sense of time. Nothing illustrates this better than the following video of a masterclass given in 2008 by Maria Pires, a pianist originally from Portugal. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall! However, thanks to the technology of the internet, we are all able to sit at the feet of the guru!