"The more the world is changing, the more it stays the same, life is full of small surprises, it's a never ending game..." -- Miss Cilla Black

Life It occurs to me that I haven't written a proper version of one of these since the Proms so here's an update. In the past couple of weeks I began a new job (yes, the one whose interview happened this day) and everything's going fine so far. Like the other one which begins again at the weekend, it's part time which leaves room for other things and both help with the forward momentum of what I want to be doing with my life. Abruptly, that's all I'm going to say about that for reasons I wrote about here, last time I mentioned having a new job. Oddly enough, I notice my anonymous commenting grammar and spelling checker was at work in that post as well. Hmm. I do wish people would put a name to their criticism.

Anyway, other than that I'm continuing with my music appreciation investigation, learning today about 'word painting', a technique used during the renaissance period when vocalisation was still king. What it describes is the way that composers and musicians would make the music mirror the words being sung. So if someone is singing the word 'ascending', the notes themselves move upward, 'descending' leads to them going downwards and if the subject of the song is 'running' the tempo becomes really fast. Which explains to a degree why the madrigal music from the period sounds relatively alien to these ears. It also reminds me of the film music which is sometimes described as 'mickey-mousing' in which the score matches the on-screen action. If someone climbs stairs, the piano works its way up the scale; if they're surprised there's a crash from the low notes.

I'm not sure what the blogging equivalent is, but imagine what it might be when I say that the next post is going to be an update of the 100 things about me. V 2.0 if you will. It's four years since the last one and I want to update a few things. I don't even have a filing cabinet any more for example.

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