The cold October wind comes by
And better close the door and windows.
There’s left the rattling of a fly—
The strident cricket in the winrows.
We all must dance to that old ground
As all the while the world goes round.
Bring in the alder for the fire—
The kindling withered to the root,
For so must all of our desire
Be someday burned to ash and soot.
We all must dance to that old ground
As all the while the world goes round.
But let us mull the winter’s wine
And drink to every breath we’ve taken,
To days of grapes plucked from the vine—
To love requited and forsaken.
We all must dance to that old ground
As all the while the world goes round.
June 14th 2024
Another of Duni’s songs from the novel WistThistle: Along the Way.
(I thought I might should probably add that a ground is a “A composition in which the bass, consisting of a few bars of independent notes, is continually repeated to a varying melody.“
A few of Bach’s Canons on the Goldberg Ground (Spotify Link)
PoemShape 
This poem, and somewhat the music, reminded me of growing up in the Folk Music Capital of the World, Mountain View, Arkansas. While I never grew to like banjo, fiddle, or mandolin music, I did love the stories when the songs told stories. Jimmy Driftwood’s wife Cleda Morris taught third grade at Mountain View elementary when I was in third grade, so he was a regular visitor to class. Here’s where you can check out Jimmy’s work https://youtu.be/SiNWx_IZUj8?si=WKTAQQ6a9sj_3_mU. Anyway, this reminded me of those days and those folk songs that I heard all around me as I grew up.
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That’s pretty cool. Ostensibly, that’s what country music continues to do, but the stories have pretty much turned to cliché or belligerence.
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What’s really amazing about these canons by Bach, by the way, is that they’re all canons, and all written over the same ground. It would be like singing row your boat in rounds, except that one person sings row your boat backwards, another sings it at twice the speed, another at half the speed, another sings the melody upside down, and everyone does it at the same time and it all works. This is literally what’s happening in these pieces. Bach wrote about a dozen of these canons and then wrote: Etc. Yeah, he says, I could do this all day if I wanted.
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I wish that I was knowledgeable enough about Bach and his music to converse intelligently about it. However, I am woefully uneducated regarding most types of what is considered “classical” music. I can tell you that I know what I like when I hear it. That’s about it. It sounds like some amazing stuff. But, all that I know are Toccata and Fugue in D minor, the Brandenburg concertos, and other things like that. I am not well versed in Bach.
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Yeah, we know what we know about the music we love.
But Bach’s genius is just in a league of its own, even apart from Mozart or Beethoven. That doesn’t mean anyone is duty bound to like his music, but when other composers were composing music, Bach was doing that and creating these jaw-dropping pieces of musical architecture that no other composer came close to. It wasn’t enough for him to simply compose a great melody, but he would treat it to musical permutations that defy analogies. The best analogy I can come up with, perhaps, is to imagine being able to listen to ten readers reading ten different passages from the same book (think of those as melodies), at the same time, and being able to repeat and combine each of those ten from memory, at the same time, into one seamless whole. The analogy is limited, but that’s the kind of genius Bach possessed. A musical piece wasn’t just a single melody to him, but a concert of melodies—each individual. He used to say that the best music was a conversation among equals.
Anyway, this is just me talking about one of my lifelong love affairs.
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