Dreams

I don't get the impact of women's choirs. Men's choirs are powerful and deep in tone, children's choirs are sweet and innocent, boy's choirs are sonorous and emotionally moving. But women's choirs? The deep tone that is meant to reside in the bassline is lost in the difficult range of the alto voice; the notes below middle C do not have the resonance they might if they were sung by a tenor.

Besides my initial dislike of the blend of voices in a women's choir, the text of this particular piece, The Beauty of Your Dreams, is decidedly lacking. It's extracted from a single quote, which perhaps isn't the exact problem. The song builds in tonal depth as phrases are repeated, in what I think is generally called a more pointillistic approach. But the actual text does not build in depth, and it fails to inspire me. It talks about believing in your dreams, casting out fear, and facing the unknown. Unfortunately it doesn't explain how to cast out fear or where that strength eminates from. What if your dreams are not philanthropic? What if your dreams are ugly? Of course the philosophical perspective of extreme humanism it comes from is rather radical (that would be dictionary-definition of 'radical,' not slang for 'cool'). I mean, for this text to be inspiring you'd have to believe we all have wonderful dreams to create a better society for all humanity, that we have minimal evil intentions and are not swayed by greed or lust, and apparently we have super powers for facing fear and conquering the unknown. It's just not realistic enough to pull your heart strings or strike a chord with the soul.

Maybe she's talking not about visionary dreams, but literal dreams! Except there are very few literal dreams I would ever want to believe in, or hope to come true. I rarely remember my dreams, but this week I haven't slept without them, or actually remembering them that is. They're all very frustrating, though. Some of my worst were being able to understand English, but only thinking and talking in German, and more recently searching for something or someone and I didn't know what it was and I couldn't stop till I found it or them, and it just went on forever. Never did figure out what or who I was looking for. That's a tangent, it really has nothing to do with the song...

I keep coming back to Robert Burns, and the way his writing touches everyone. If you get past the Scottish slang, he is the everyday man's man. He writes about falling, about picking ourselves up to struggle on with the human life, loving with the depths of our being, death and taxes. In essence he explains following your dreams, and the human battle for existence. For indeed, isn't existence the simplest of dreams? He is a different pot of ink altogether, but that is the kind of dream, the facing of fears and the unknown, the beautiful dreams that relate to every man. Those are dreams that I do believe are beautiful, and are actually worth believing in.