Life in Music

Life is a cadential six-four

Holding us in suspense

Penultimate to the reality of the afterlife

And the return of our soul to do

Sometimes it's an unresolved five-seven

Left hanging in the muggy air of a theory classroom

One late May morning, after the professor has lost hope

In modulation comprehension

More often than not, life is a deceptive cadence,

It's true direction uncertain and knowable only to Fate, the composer

Sometimes we yearn for the sweet vanilla timbre of a five to one,

But we become tangled in infinite circles of fifths

Other times we look for the adventure of minor six,

But stop on five.

When we lose all hope, we grasp at the compromise

Of a common tone modulation, only to allude to a foreign key

With sharps and flats coming from all sides, crowding the staff

If we’re lucky, life is an augmented six chord

Full of beautiful ambiguity.

The best of which is the French Surprise

We try to live in what we think is harmony,

But really it's just white noise posing as a unison.

The dissonance of relationships

Imitates the consonance of intervals

When we see someone, in theory, as a perfect fifth

The sol to our do, we realize too late

That we missed an accidental,

And unable to reconcile

Harp on as a wide tri-tone

Leaping above our friends and colleagues,

Always lands us on ti or te, where we need help

Getting up or stepping down

We ornament the melodies of our lives

With harsh bravura trills, and turns out of key

Our self is lost, when we neglect simplicity

In the end we are forgotten here

Some unfinished symphonies

Others full works, great in our own day

But unfashionable now

Our only home is heaven

Where new worlds of harmony

Unencumbered by rules

Set us free as the music of the cosmos

Haunting the stone deaf ears of genius

Who eventually gets us right

This poem came about after I saw a discussion on my choral professor's whiteboard. I began to think about the imitation of life and music, and how we describe the events of our short lives here on earth. Every composer imparts upon their music some, if not all, of their life, and even the simplest chord progressions and cadences speak volumes about who we are.

How do you define your life musically?