Corey Mwamba

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Entries for 4th Jan 2013

Yesterday, I decided to refresh the score to an older song of mine, Bereft. Today, I'm taking a look at Golden.... You can get the score. Both of these were played in Argentum.

Listen to it here:

Golden... is a piece I've written about before, but it was in a comment on Facebook. What I said then mostly holds true now, so I'll re-use: I wrote the song when I was about 18 or 19. I know this because when I found it just over ten years later, it had my handwriting of that time and my name at the top. But when I found it I didn't understand it. I am looking at the original now—and I still do not understand it as I wrote it then.

From what I can gather, when I was 19 I was actually much smarter than I am now, and really into connecting harmonies in different keys using web-like structures. When I look at them now they remind me of boron cage structures, and that would align right with my degree days; but I did not know about boron cages at the time when I wrote it.

It took me days to decipher what I'd first written. I remember writing it down on a scrap of paper and swore I'd never lose it in case I ever had to explain it again—but I've moved house many times since then. I'm never going to find that scrap of paper. But I still have the original, so if anyone wants I'll try and work through it again!

What's really interesting for me was that as I was re-scoring this I realised that it'd be pretty difficult for me to write like this now—it's like a totally different voice... but SOUNDS familiar.

Anyway, when I was putting together the music for Argentum I felt I needed a driving, optimistic song [I think it sounds optimistic, anyway]. I was listening through my old MIDI files and found two work-throughs of Golden... and thought "wow. how does THAT work?"

I then searched for my old folder with all the scraps of paper and found my mad teenage notes and just shook my head. But it sounded like the song I needed to finish the gig, so I worked between my notes and the MIDI file to transcribe it in my old notation software. I then handed it over to the group.

I have to be honest, I'm still not sure if I get exactly how it works in a functional harmonic sense. But I still feel it works from a musical sense.

At some points the different harmonies just reduce to the same chord, but some parts are definitely polytonal.

Anyway, if you feel like playing it, please download the PDFs! I've produced transposed melody parts too.