Re-working My Dark Rosaleen

 

I have been re-working "my Dark Rosaleen" for the last month, trying to bring it closer to how it sounds in my head.

Part of the struggle was to find a new suitable image. I got this together yesterday, making it out of two photos I took recently in the Botanic Gardens, or, rather, one  photo and an image from a video (and then worked on in Photoshop):

"Dark Rosaleen" is a metaphor for Ireland, which should be evident in the image as well as the words. The Botanic Gardens give a good representation of Irish land, darkened by photographing into the sun, to which I added some mountains ("\Over hills and through dales") and waters of a river in spate. ("The Erne at its highest flood I dashed across unseen"), giving the following record cover:

Where does my tune come from? Well, I decided to write the tune, because I considered that all the previous tunes I heard the song played to were contrived. To me every poem comes with built in music of its own. For example, when you recite the words "O my dark Rosaleen," you surely find that  your voice goes up three tones in each phrase. Your voice rises "Doh, Ray Me, Doh, Ray, Me," as you go "O My Dark, Ros-A-Leen," (However, when I try it on the whistle, I find it is not "Doh Ray Me," but "Me, Fah, Soh"), and so on. So I give the song the air I hear it coming with, in place of previous contrived airs.

In 2023 all of my compositions were effected by playing on my Yamaha keyboard. This has its drawback that I have never learned to play the keyboard, and each composition goes to multiple takes because of repeated errors. Previously I had used Sibelius, wherein you type each note into its position on sheet music (as above). Tedious, but it has the advantage that once a note, or sequence of notes, is typed into its correct position, you can leave it  there forever, copy it and repeat it and add other sequences in place as you wish. I had already typed in the tune in 2020, so now all I had to do, is delete the bits I no longer wanted and add the new bits I had in mind. I replaced trumpet and tenor sax with banjo and tidied up the drum beat. Then I captured the score as a sound file, opened it in Mixpad, added my voice, balanced the two, and Bob's your uncle:

(Unfortunately, in the following embedded version, "Amazing Radio" has pasted in its logo, hiding the flooded river).