Listen to my new music – Fall (Musical Haiku on Guitar):
You see it falling from a tree with its sunset colours of brown, yellow, and red. Like it’s saying its last few words before landing on the ground. It’s a moment of sadness, but also of sheer beauty, as you appreciate and admire it.
Fall (Musical Haiku on Guitar) is a musical miniature about appreciating the little things in life, like an autumn leaf. Today was the Autumn Equinox in the northern hemisphere. So it’s perfect timing to release this (very) short guitar piece when my favourite season begins.
Musical Haiku?
This piece is my humble homage to the unique Japanese type of poetry – Haiku. Haiku’s short poems are often about nature, and there are more than a few that mention autumn, especially in Bashō’s poems, like:
It gains a richer colour
Falling upon the bean-curd
A single autumn leaf
– Matsuo Bashō (1677) / Translated by Thomas McAuley
I’d like to think of Musical Haiku as a new experimental music genre. In this piece, I translated the Haiku form of 3 lines of 5-7-5 Japanese phonetic units into notes. But there are more ways to interpret this poetry, which I write about in my guitar book and in a Musical Haiku guitar lesson I’ll publish in a few days time.
3-5-7: is that a coincidence?
It made sense to let the music “fall” from a high note to a lower note, like the autumn leaf. Autumn leaves are also fragile. That’s why I’ve played some natural harmonics, which sound delicate. The leaf represents a cycle of life and seasons, so the music has a circle as well: the first and last notes are the same (C).
Since every leaf is different, like snowflakes, I thought of transforming each leaf into a unique melody. That way, each of the three lines will represent a different leaf, and you can imagine that the leaf’s tips are notes. A typical autumn leaf that I imagined, like from a Japanese Maple tree, usually has 3, 5 or 7 tips. These are the same numbers as a Haiku poem. Is that a coincidence?
Another concept in Haiku is Kireji which means a “cutting word” that should end each line. Its purpose is to add a pause – a time for reflection and to read between the lines. So my musical interpretation was to let the notes vibrate in between.
Thanks for listening and reading this. I’d love to know what you think about it! Comment below: