Program Notes:

The name and concept for this song came from the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” by T.S. Eliot, assigned for one of the seminars at the Marchutz School of Vision in France. Eliot discusses that a poet who is simultaneously aware of all history and the present moment is one who will impact future poems and inform past ones. I applied his theory to any creation an artist makes and all of human history. The first verse begins with a C major over E (the tonic in first inversion) and rises to a D half-diminished seven chord (the diminished supertonic borrowed from C minor), then falls back to a C major over E. This is already a very unusual progression, which I enjoyed because of it’s unfamiliarity. The chorus transitions to a D dominant seven, the secondary dominant, so one would expect to hear it resolve to a G major chord, but instead, it falls to a D half-diminished seven chord and then back to C major. During the second verse, there are several unconventional chords such as C major over F#, C major suspended-four over F, and G minor suspended-four over D, which creates the uncommon minor five suspended chord in second inversion. When writing this piece, I did not realize how atypical the progression was, I simply loved the ambiguity between major and minor keys and it made me think of how music is timeless, but also temporary in that it can only be heard in the present moment, then it no longer exists.