Layered Soundscape Strata
by Odin Roark

Did Bach know to what end
his harvest of melodies-in-parallel would become?

Scholars ponder the creation of counterpoint.

Musical destiny?

A hybrid tonal- fruit of beauty
knowing no boundary,
bewildering those of first look,
given the past of musical staffs,
voicings and manuscripts,
conformed to traditional confinement?

What spurred his palette of sound
to become one with the elusive rainbow,
providing independence through marriage of numbers,
allowing prolonged courtship,
sanctioning unknown combinations to verge,
converge,
separate,
return to coalesce?

And so…

From guitar
to clavichord,
string quartets
to symphonies,
Charlie Parker to Philip Glass,
counterpart airs were discovered,
became melodious architecture
challenging new musical frontiers,
moving past sonorous ancient rules,
reducing history's marble monuments of song
to respectful reflections of past memory.

The 20th Century popularization of Bach's invention
soared beyond the artistic elite,
for in '55 "Picnic" graced movie screens
initiating the unsuspecting
elevating emotion with layered melodies;
Moonglow played under the film’s love theme,
a Bachian kaleidoscope of synchronous colors
reaching the century's new romantics,
keyed into a music major,
minored ala Brubeck,
scat-a-tized via Ella and Mel
and making the unity of opposites a given.

Thus…

From Bach's synthesis of two dimensions,
musical ironies evolved,
influencing the lexicon of writers' imagination,
line upon line,
stanza to stanza,
chapter to chapter,
making magical,
layers of double entendre,
metaphor,
subtext,
the non-linear imaginings
of contrapuntal thinking,
all translated into
infinite language-in-progress
perhaps a major stepping stone in evolution.

And so…

With applause knowing nowhere to go,
except to acknowledge the roots of prodigy,
here’s a high five to the man
who pioneered so much of our soundscape,
taught us all the numbers of romance,
surreptitiously created a modern-day metaphor
for man’s attraction to opposites,
newly designed arpeggios with many colors,
intimacy finding calm amidst the chaos.

If only there could be
an encore, Maestro Bach…

If only.