Sparks from the Fire

We continue the adventure of our Top 3 Inspirational pieces of music by category.  Yesterday we covered Classical, Rock and Folk; today we’ll try to cover Pop (Nearly impossible to pick the top 3), tomorrow on to R&B and Broadway and who knows what else.

The Beatles

Please remember that these are my personal most Inspirational songs – not necessarily my favorites, but the ones that have had the most Inspirational impact on my life as a composer and music listener.

Here goes.

POP
1. Hey Jude – The Beatles / John Lennon and Paul McCartney

In 1968, John Lennon and his wife Cynthia Lennon separated due to his affair with Yoko Ono. Soon afterwards, Paul McCartney drove out to visit Cynthia and Julian, her son with Lennon. “We’d been very good friends for millions of years and I thought it was a bit much for them suddenly to be personae non gratae and out of my life,” McCartney said. Later, Cynthia Lennon recalled, “I was truly surprised when, one afternoon, Paul arrived on his own. I was touched by his obvious concern for our welfare… On the journey down he composed ‘Hey Jude’ in the car. I will never forget Paul’s gesture of care and concern in coming to see us.”

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I just woke up with this idea — all because I had a song running through my brain.  At first it was to give my own imaginary award for the Top 3 Inspirational songs or pieces of music of my own life.

Bill Haley and the Comets

It rapidly expanded to the following:  Here they are by category.

TOP 3 CLASSICAL
1. Third Symphony, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs by Henryk Górecki

Górecki said of this, “Perhaps people find something they need in this piece of music […] somehow I hit the right note, something they were missing. Something somewhere had been lost to them. I feel that I instinctively knew what they needed.”

Why this first?  Because with it, I was inspired to fall in love with my wife.  An easy pick.

2. Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) by Igor Stravinsky

Composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein said of one passage, “That page is sixty years old, but it’s never been topped for sophisticated handling of primitive rhythms…”, and of the work as a whole, “…it’s also got the best dissonances anyone ever thought up, and the best asymmetries and polytonalities and polyrhythms and whatever else you care to name.”

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