More Dia de los Muertos than Halloween

words and music: J. Bigelow/J. Dunn

There is a trumpet player performing at the Bluffs in Long Beach during the regular 11am Yoga class. He plays the open note on a Bb trumpet, pausing to breathe with the class between. Depending on the weather, there can also be an Ab flat fog horn and the Queen Mary’s contra bellow, the Harley Davidson motor noise, the delivery truck backup alerts. Everything falls into relationship with the Bb, even the Bb itself, which is never quite the same twice, just as a breath is never the same twice. All of music starts to seem as a melody over a ground. Christian Wolff defined melody as a succession of any two or more events in time.  While I take a narrower definition, the relation of pitched event to other pitched event, overlaying a fixed field of a static field, becomes an aural metaphor, a living demonstration of the experience of being human. Music is a temporal art form just as living life can be, given the right perspective.