A Story to be Spoken in the Key of Eb
Author's Note
Due to a formatting incompatibility, diminished chords are notated with a lower case "o."
A Story to be Spoken in the Key of Eb
Eb6
"When nuclear bombs are falling on top of your head, is your first thought to save your records?
B7
No. Of course it’s not. It’s nopony’s first thought. It’s not the second thought or the third thought. Usually those are stupid worthless thoughts about how the sun must be reflecting off a street sign, or how--golly gee, that breeze sure is strong today!, or perhaps an interrogative as to whether or not Princess Celestia tripped on her royal bathroom rug and dropped the sun, if she could really drop such a thing like you would a coffee mug or a warhead. It’s not the fourth or fifth or sixth (those are reserved for family and, on occasion, religion) or seventh or eighth (more religion--or last-minute conversion--and a good dose of denial right before the blast wave picks up the thinker and his thoughts and throws them a few hundred feet for good measure).
F-7
Eight to the bar gets you real far, but when the bar’s measuring the last private production--not the measures--it goes form over function. Big thoughts. God, the world, me, you, what you had for lunch, the simple silly things that become more pronounced when you have more important things on your mind.
Bb7
The end of the world tends to make you prioritize. That old ratty record you bought at the five and dime, the one that maybe might have a tune you like and maybe might have a different tune that plays the whole way through without skipping-- it loses value in a hurry. Ten cents ain’t enough to buy back the time you could have spent hugging your mother or kissing your lover or pining for another house you saw in the newspaper. In your defense it might not be worth as much as the minutes of your time it took to wait in line at the store to buy it, but sometimes that’s a sad and true lie.
Eb6
If you’re alive by the ninth, you think about running. Or hiding. Depends on where you are. Running away into the original sunset or hiding in a soundproof basement or locking yourself in a coffin and burying yourself alive. Like I said, it depends. The act of surviving is about the same as before--money and good luck pretty much guaranteed a long life--only the in-between changed. The function of getting from A to B gets all rewritten, like a countermelody to a copyrighted song, but you start--tonic root position--and end--dead--at the same place. Whether you tacit or play along, all songs must end in silence.
B7
There’s some meaning for you, disguised in pathetic horse shit: the one common trait of all music is that it ends. How’s that for the essence of music? Can’t live without it duct tape that holds the worlds of the world together bridges cultures with a soprano saxophone and a backbeat kick the feet out from under previous generation for the hell of it rock and roll gospel save your soul smooth jazz razamatazz zig zag culture bang big band on a microphone stand emo thriller plain vanilla gumbo bayou rehashed food-cliché creole be all end all end of the world orchestra bring down the house with taiko drums buddy rich tearing the skins apart elevator muzak bethoofen heart attack celestial belt keyboard thumping bible humping ninetysomething key piano kinda moody kinda bluesy dooky dukish sharing a stage and a staff with a bass riding a fretboard through the sine waves spades sonic texture keys on top of keys organ moan electric soul and proud rock it around rocket to the deepest parts of space that made room for a record of our sound
F-7
And we dropped it and ran.
Bb7
We cut it off. Mad maestros running away from a booing hissing crackling burning exploding crowd. Left it in silence. After the radiation killed the orchestra and sucked the carbon out of nature that’s all that was left. A very loud and fatally permanent silence.
Eb6
Lost a lot of history in those first months.
Db7
A lot of famous dead musicians went silent forever without so much as a coda or a greatest hits compilation. Everyone loves music, right? So why didn’t we save it? I don’t know. Maybe we didn’t love it as much as we thought, or we thought we didn’t need to pay our dearly departed Beethoofen a damned bit for using his music as the background music to our apocalypse. You know how musicians are. Pay them and they come back asking for more. Money as the opiate, the means of survival. Hey--maybe they aren’t so different from the rest of the population.
C7
There’s some pathetic horse shit for you, disguised as meaning. We saved the nukes and we saved the Marenelisa but we forgot Gene Hoofa’s drumset. The first drumset ever. It’s gone. What else did we forget? So much had already slipped through the cracks, a sad comic lack of proper recording equipment and sympathy to accept griffon rags and riffs as comparable to their sweeter pony peers. Music history’s been full of giant souls, but it’s also riddled with racists and speciesists and whatever other -ists you can think of. However many ways there are to hate another living creature. Too many. Musicians are a snapshot of their life and time, and a lot of that time was spent denying birds--Bird in particular, and Byrd, and Birdy, and Pappa Bird, and most of Birdland in general--the records and the means to make them. The results come again and again and we’re still too hooked on the sweet stuff to pull our head out of the gramaphony bell and sober up to the booze and bitters. Can’t be drunk when listening to jazz if you want to catch all the subtle licks and fills, but god knows you have to be drunk as hell to make it.
Csus
Gods know we made music. They heard it, wherever they are. They can’t forget. They can’t--I don’t know every musician who ever lived. I have at my disposal a brief overview of ponykind’s collective musical efforts, but I can’t remember everything. They probably do. That seems like the kinda thing gods are good at. Remembering. Maybe they can’t be there, but maybe they’ll remember.
F7
That’s how good ponies have well-attended funerals and bad ponies have their names etched in stone tablets. Most musicians aren’t good ponies. Maybe that’s why they’re gone and we’re still here. We were just a little better than them. Maybe that’s why the best musicians die in the back of classic carriages all alone in the dark while the sheriffs who die screaming at monsters who wander into their respective towns get memorials, the terraces terraces terraced dynamics of weeping and mourning where the sun shines and the grass almost sorta grows. We’re gonna get swept up on the blastwave one day, but they’re already gone with the wind.
Bb7
That’s some end. I wonder how the guys dropping the nukes factored that kinda stuff into their bombsights. Point three clicks to the right so the colt who bullied his brother gets vaporized, two clicks down so the kind old stallion who serenades the pedestrians on that one street corner gets thrown onto his mattress and lives. Instant death for some, and for the rest long lives. Sing song live long now your home’s collapsing. Sing a song of war to men and they will surely die. Punish the musicians who dare to put it on. Punish those responsible so they may not live long. The ricochet sweep up the bend descend to the F major seven.
F7
Not good enough. That won’t do. That’s a bad chord to end on. We need resolution.
Bb7
And.
Eb6
Life can’t be random. Improv can’t really be improvised--just poorly planned. Ponies can’t just die for no reason. Some shadow in a hole half a world away writes .251 instead of .2511 on a coordinates chart and I survive? The director’s cut-off looks a bit too much like a roll of his hoof and the drummer makes up a solo on the spot?
Bb+7
It can’t be a string of mistakes. It’s not.
Eb6
There has to be resolution.
Db7
We’ll wait until it happens.
C7
Resolve.
F7
Resolve.
Bb7
Resolve.
F7
Resolve.
Bb7
Resolve!
Eb6
There we go. Breathe.
Ab6
You ever see somepony doubled over in pain next to a music player, it’s not because they drank irradiated water. You read up on Beethoofen. V7’s hurt his ears. I wonder if the last chord he ever heard was a good one, or if it left him hanging for the rest of his life. When every piece of music is your last, you listen closely. I hope he heard a tonic chord before he went deaf--but if he heard a V7 just before his hearing left--if that V7 banging around in his head drove him to write masterpieces even though he couldn’t hear, like he was trying to exorcise a demon of the inner ear, the ring buzz sting song that feeds off the wrong and cringes crumples cries and fades under the death blow of the final resolution--I guess that’s okay too.
Ao
Music’s got a beginning and it’s an end, but you don’t hear any traveling bands worth their salt playing two-note concerts. Maybe it didn’t end for Beethoofen. Maybe it did. I hope it won’t end for us. I always knew those fools arguing about whether it’d be a bang or a whimper never stopped to consider a harmonization of the two: guns, then flute. Pain, then mute. Bang, then whimper.
Eb6
You and I are not a whimper. You and I are the miraculous survivors of the most horrific tragedy in the universe. There’s the bang. Where’s the whimper then, huh? All I hear is--a man projecting himself through a piece of brass, slicing out his soul with his diaphragm and squeezing it through a conical metal hole. Flim flam zam bam scap-boodeeyou-dat. Forget death metal--I know I did--that’s pretty hardcore.
Ab6
My point is this. The man has soul! A soul! Sorry, had soul. He found a way to preserve it on vinyl, which was then subsequently not melted in an atomic fireball. How fortunate! His soul rigamarole, his satin doll, survived long enough for me to collect it and properly respect it, by wearing it down with a needle.
Ao
His rigamarole through time hasn’t ended yet. Neither has ours. Coincidence? Or is it the stars?
Eb6
Here’s my theory.
Bb+7
I’m convinced this is the diminuendo. Here it is. The piano in the forte-piano-crescendo. Those bombs were loud, deafeningly loud, louder than a hundred thousand million trumpets and strings and drums beating at the same time bleating their swan song fleeting flitting their time away in the echoes of a concert hall. They drowned out the music--the birds, the pianos, the morning alarms, the calls to disarm from the protesters the politicians the child molesters--even the bad guys have your desire to survive--the sickos and the scholars the jets and the sharks the kids with high marks and the ones still in diapers.
Eb6
Boom two three Boom two three Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom
Db7
That was the forte. That was the big note that makes you go rigid and still. Think of a fancy audience in a concert hall. They’ve been listening to the strings and the evening news since they’ve been born. Some of them are falling asleep. They need an end so they can clap and go home and turn on the ten o’clock roundup. Any good conductor knows the only fitting end to a long stretch of music is more music. It’s the only logical way. You can’t just throw down your baton on the V7 and walk offstage. What would Beethoofen think?
C7
A prelude to silence can only logically be sound, just as a prelude to an end must be a beginning, and a middle. One can’t exist without the other, yes? Repeat the bit about the two-note concerts. The middle seems to get the short end of the stick when talking about beginnings and ends, but without it the start and the finish would float around aimlessly, separated by a lack of context. The middle is where you get frightened or lulled to sleep or poisoned with radiation. The middle is where you get opened up. It’s where the music exposes your guts with a blast wave more powerful than any bomb. It’s what keeps you.
F7
It’s all about that middle. The beginning sets it up so it makes sense and the end finishes the job.
Bb7
We’re in the middle right now. We’re in the quiet before the crescendo, the sforzando diminuendo into the crescendo--but not quite there yet. The valley of sound has hit bedrock. There’s nowhere left to go but up. When we’re at our lowest, there’s nothing else to do but lift the sound. Lift it high and let it ring, carry it around and see what it’ll bring. It brings me tips and food, and on occasion ponies like you.
F7
That’s how I’m rebuilding. Some ponies lift walls and baskets of crops. Others lift guns.”
Bb7
The storyteller lifted a record in a dust-covered sleeve.
Eb6
"This, my attentive friend, is Benny Goodmane.”
D7
“This is the last known record of his works. Big band jazz. He filled Carneighge hall once. Now he's dead and his records are probably vaporized, or they fell off a shelf or something. I don't know. This his greatest hits record.
Db7
I’m not gonna play it for you. I’ve heard it enough. But I want somepony else to hear it. So I’m gonna give it to you. You’re free to do whatever you’d like with it. Smash it in front of me or have it bronzed. Whatever. Take it in a hurry though, or you’ll hold up the line. All those ponies behind you--the reason they're all standing there is because they have records they want to hear played on my gramaphony. They've either found them in crates on the side of the road or they've been gifted them by one of my friends and now finally have the opportunity to listen to them. You don’t like it? Then take it and give it to someone else. That's the point. Music is the last thing to be saved. So I've taken it upon myself to save it. Now I hope you’ll do the same.
C7
You’re Mr. Goodmane's last hope. If you don't take it I'll have to drop it. Eightysomething years of training and devotion. Everything that mattered. Crack. Shattered."
F7
The storyteller, a griffon in a ripped suit and a soft blue tie, shifted in his seat and rested an arm on the record player at his side. In front of him, a record sat on an overturned milk crate. In front of that rested a confident looking earth pony who had some time ago stopped like the others to listen to the music pouring from the record player's makeshift aluminum bell. The music was almost over now, the chord changes nearly complete. Most of the other ponies had other things to do, so they left. But this one pony was still there, eyeing him with a look of familiar casual racism. Griffons--crazy bunch. And this one had a music box and a story.
Bb7
A dozen or so smiling faces adorned the cover of the record. It read, BENNY GOODMANE GREATEST HITS Vol 1 & 2.
Eb6
The storyteller leaned in with the music. As the chords twisted, dominant to subdominant to leading tone V7, he slid the record away from him, towards the pony before him, just like he had done a hundred times before.
Bb+7
"Save Mr. Goodmane and his band. Lift his sound. Save his soul."
♩!
