Poseur to Composer

A Mighty Hand-Washing Technique

Posted by Jason Comely on March 10th, 2020

With a certain nasty virus that's running amok, here's a way to stay healthy (and praise God at the same time).

What Music Is Most Likely to Give You the Chills?

Posted by Jason Comely on March 4th, 2020

Re: Person I Knew by Bill Evans Trio https://t.co/qv2wOYuTLH This song gives me the chills!
— Poser to Composer (@posertocomposer) May 14, 2020

Still reading the book Why You Like It: The Science and Culture of Musical Taste (and will be for awhile still). Here's an interesting bit about what music is most likely to give you the chills, and why:

Neuroscientist Eckart Altenmüller ... attributes the rise of music to its potent ability to elicit strong or "chill" emotions within us; music-derived chills may have initially developed to help with auditory perception or memory consolidation, but were later valued for general "aesthetic" feelings of well-being, to forget the hardships of life...

In the new age realm, composers like Yanni, Enya, Mike Oldfield, and Steven Halpern utilize free-floating nonmetric music—usually with limited diatonic harmonies and sustained melodies—to evoke nonmusical themes of inner harmony, the cosmos, nature, and dreams. This is the genre of music you likely heard the last time you got a massage. Ambient music is similarly meditative or "chill"-inducing, although aimed at a decidedly edgier cultural demographic.

This bears out to be true, at least in my case. If you want to conduct a little experiment, here's a playlist of ambient music I made that consistently gives me goosebumps. See if it does for you too.

Neither Limber nor Nimble

Posted by Jason Comely on March 2nd, 2020

A quick update on learning to play my first arrangement:

There's a part in my arrangement of A Mighty Fortress Is Our God when I use the one and four fingers to play notes E and B, then three and five to play C and A, then back to E and B with one and four. It's a challenge for these cumbersome hands of mine.

Likewise with doing ASL (American Sign Language, something else I'm currently learning in my spare time). My fingers are slow doing numbers six to nine. Easy stuff for most people, but not for me (yet).