yxmass
See Ky and me playing it live: https://youtu.be/tSaSx_CzpSQ
or its first ever performance: https://youtu.be/0EZsiE19hTM
I was born about a year ago, the first 2 months were a blur
But my senses sharpened up a touch, and much learning did occur
Both my folks are uni lecturers, prone to mental acrobatics
For my father’s field is physics and my mother's, mathematics
Quarks, quadratics and quaternions quite consume my day's activity
Really reeling in the realm of Riemann surfaces and relativity
They play music from all round the world and I savour every quaver
I taste vegies from the garden and I crave that savoury flavour
It's a drug free, grog free, low waste home, so rational and wise
So that's why the last few weeks events so took me by surprise
Since I first heard of Santa, things have gone weird
Each time I see the guy he’s got a different beard
And his presently presented present presentation rate
Would require his reindeer acquire a quantum state
He’d have to have a fractal sack and spacetime cracks or rifts
To timelily deliver all those gifts
Such anomalies aside, there’s other change I find dismaying
There’s a lot of talk of slaying and preying in the songs that they’ve been playing
And they sing of little chord Gsus in A major, while clearly
I can hear that song’s Away in F major, I mean, now, really!
All the music's style is silky sweet, in the ilk of Acker Bilk
And our food’s become all sugary too, even more than mother’s milk
I’m not wrapped with all the plastic packaged, non-compostability
And there’s coloured lighting left on all night, on a dying indoor tree
I need answers, Mum and Dad aren't near, I see my chance and hence
I crawl over to my sister and with an effort quite immense, I say
"All this doesn’t make sense
Santa doesn’t make sense
This just doesn’t make sense
Christmas doesn’t make sense
What’s the deal? Is it real?”
My dear sister says, “Wait, what?! You can speak?” My verbal skills quite floored her
I say, “Up 'til now I’ve had no need, as all has been in order”
So she says, “Well, now you’re talking, put a cork in it, please, bro
Cos if we don’t believe in Santa, then the presents stop, you know”
“Ah, I see!”, I say, “although I feel the stuff we have’s enough
So perhaps we could just gift it on to folks who do it tough?"
Dad calls out “we’re off to mass, it could get heavy, wait and see”
Mum calls back and laughs, “you say that with a sense of gravity”
My sis whispers, “we just go to church each year to keep gran happy”
I revert to "goo" and "ga" and smile, as they dress up all snappy
We bike down to the chapel, and then as we park it,
I realise it’s where they hold the farmers’ market
That's why it rang a bell, but now it does literally
As we head inside with gran and all the family
It feels divine to be here with my whole clan on hand
And gosh, this building sure is grand
The minister administers his ministration
And parts of it impart for me some consternation
It makes me think of Fritz Zwicky's Tired Light
Ideas so appealing and yet not quite right
But words like "do as you'd be done" and neighbourly love
Befit the beauty of the music and the coloured windows up above
Back at home with all my rellies round I’m realising that for most of them
The main reason for the season's not the bonnie barn born bairn of Bethlehem
Sipping Rose, with a rosy glow, I suppose those folks are far more liable
To be jocularly quaffing Christmas spirits than imbibing from the Bible
“Time for presents!” someone calls and a game of Secret Santa Swap and Steal is played
And the offerings are, on the whole, second hand and/or home made
Then they dim the lights and my parents bring in
A one candle cake, polytonally singin'
Happy Birthday with my name on the lydian chord
Wait a second… come again… am I the recycled Lord?
When it's blown over, I quiz my sister about it and she says, “Woah!
I had that thought when you were born a year ago”.
“Yeah, but bro, you know, you wouldn’t want to be that bonus biblical boss
'Cos at Easter time we celebrate him being nailed onto a cross!
In post-pagan mish-mash of bunnies, buns and chocolate eggs, and hence
Easter doesn’t make sense
But does it need to make sense?
The big bang’s unimaginably immense
Black holes are intangibly intense
Existence doesn’t make sense
Christmas doesn’t make sense
Yet how good does it feel? It’s unreal!
Yeah, for real! Really unreal! For sure. Totes, m'goats!
© Mal Webb 2022
This is a Christmas song from the point of view of a ridiculously precocious 1 year old. Yes, it's the longest lyric I've written... 800 words! Hopefully it's worth it. Musically, it's all based around the Ukranian Dorian scale (see my Chord and Scales chart for what that means) and a rather involved Malleable PolyPolyRhythm of 7 against 10 against 13 against 16 http://malwebb.com/mppr.html#yxmass ... but don't panic, it's quite nice to listen to! Here's a video about it: https://youtu.be/LEvK0up5XKs
And in case you didn't know, Quaternions ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion ) were developed by Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton in 1843 to expand the complex plane to 3 dimensions. Charles Dodgson (AKA Lewis Carroll) didn't like abstract maths and parodied quaternions with his Mat Hatter scene in Alice in Wonderland. Ironically, all the modern film versions of his story that use 3D animation would be using quaternions to calculate the rotations. This would surely have Charles 3D rotating in his grave... he he!
Riemann Surfaces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_surface are the maths that allowed Einstein's Relativity to work. Riemann was an interesting guy!
Fritz Zwicky's Tired Light was an alternative theory to universal expansion to explain the redshift of distant celestial objects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tired_light ... I actually came up with it on my own before I was told that it was already an already largely disproven theory. I still have a soft spot for it. Zwicky was a Swiss physicist who came up with Dark Matter, Supernovas and more. Quite a dude! One of his favorite insults was to refer to people whom he did not like as "spherical bastards", because, as he explained, they were bastards no matter which way one looked at them.