CHAT

Sunday, January 17

Rick plays "It Is Well With My Soul"

A student-friend pointed to this song recently so I did a playlist on it several days ago to explore it. Today, I did my first version of my rendition of it on the CASIO Previa piano with piano and strings layered sound. I did not order the music but rather worked off a chord/lyric sheet, available free on the net. The best renditions of the song go through transpositions from C through F and end in Bb so with only the key of C chords, I had to transpose in real time-- that's why I'm still fumbling a little. I'll sing it later. 
The song also reminded me of the C.S. Lewis quote that we ARE souls with bodies rather than the other way around. And the hardships we endure are tests for us, as souls, so that we can ascend to higher levels through reincarnation and eventual transcendence into what Jesus called a "glorified body"-- what we would understand as light bodies. The following playlist explores the song, the writer and the issues and begins with my effort. I'll add the song to my teaching list. 



Here's the chord/lyric sheet I worked off. You can see that I installed the Roman Numeral chords in order to do the transpose. The chord changes are quite simple so the transposing, twice, adds a fair degree of harmonic sophisication that was hard to grasp at first-- until I realized that they're doing clever  tranpositions at the beginning of every new verse. It's a cheap trick in music but it works. In this case, the embellishment of powerful vocals adds yet another dimension. Overall, an okay inspirational hymn... and apparently a popular one at that. It's on my list of songs worth learning now.


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