Lotus in My Backyard

My lotus's petals has fallen yesterday's midnight, just like the song below, and it's now the month of April!

How sweetly bloom the cherry trees
Beneath the April sky
But soon, too soon, their brightness wanes
For they must fade and die
And all their petals bright
Soon on the ground we find
For while the world doth sleep
There comes the midnight wind

::Lyrics by D. Hunt, Tune by Datuk Dr. Victor Wee::

Numerical notation for the above song: Mortal and Immortal
See The Magic of Numerical Notation for the notation system I'm using. I usually like to use "dots" i.e. "full-stop ." to indicate the octaves higher or lower, but here it's more convenient to use the system recommended by the above-mentioned site.

Time: 3/4, Key: C

5 | 5- 8 | 7- 9 | 8- -7-8 | 6- -7-6 |

5- 8 | 4 5 6 | 5-- | -- 5 |

10 11 10 | 9 10 9 | 8- 8 | 6- 6 |

5- 3 | 2- 4| 3-- | -- 3 |

6- 7 | 8- 6 | 7-- | - - 3 |

6- 6 | 5- 4 | 3-- | - - - |

10 11 10 | 9 10 9 | 8- 8 | 6- 6 |

5- 3 | 2- -4-3 | 1-- | -- :|

This was one my favourite Wayfarer's songs, a local Buddhist music group. The reason I liked this song was most probably because of the cherries and flowers and month of April. I have the full collection of the Wayfarers cassettes back then (still on my cassette rack), which I think until now still remains the same, except that the songs have been recompiled on CD. The recent years have seen talented and inspirational youths making new music and giving life to poems inside the pink/brown/dark blue Buddhist Hymns book (colour of book depending on the version/date of publication of book), published by Buddhist Missionary Society (Malaysia) and edited by Datuk Dr. Victor Wee.

I used to play the cassettes day and night, so much that I can remember almost all of the tunes until now, though I'm bad at singing out the songs with the proper lyrics. Anyway, to compensate, I can play the song on the piano anytime! Come to think of it, my cassette player has been resting for quite a long while.

Talking about the piano, I don't know when I started to have the ability of recognizing the chords and the notes of a song when I listen to them, and able to write them down without testing on the piano. The notations will just appear in my mind. It enables me to play many of the songs I like (quality of improvisation aside), and to "compose" some SATB arrangements for my college's choir team, (again, quality of arrangement aside).

Hmm... must have developed them when I'm forced to do so... when I tried to compose something for my secondary school "choir team", which we never sang as the choir team was never properly formed. Maybe it wasn't a choir team after all, just some kind of performance we wanted to do, and everything fell apart when the headgirl back then transfered to another school.

Then when I was in university, another long story, let's leave that for another day/blog.

ttg