Relicui Mei

The Circle of Fifths is central to composing, or even understanding, any music complicated enough to include a key change. Not that anyone understands car gearshifts anymore, but they are a useful metaphor.  Just as you can't slam from first gear to fourth gear without it being pretty jarring, you can't jump from one key to another in music randomly without it being jarring.  In a car, you have to transition via neutral or other gears in between.  That's kind of how music works and the circle of fifths is like a gearshift that let's you do so. With three times the number of gears, and different ones for leaded and unleaded. Metaphors aren't perfect. Most songs, even ones that have nothing but melody, have chords (a group of notes played simultaneously).  Those chords are based on the notes of the melody of the song (the melody is the "tune"; the part of a song you would whistle).  Sometimes the chords are performed, sometimes not; but even when they are no...

 I think, from a cultural perspective, it's pretty cool that the what is probably still the rockingest salsa number of the last ten years  is by a bunch of old fat people.  Because talent is not confined to the young and thin and that fact is often lost in broader American pop culture.

Even though I'd seen the film many times, it wasn't until I heard this rendition of Professor Fate's theme , from The Great Race , and the same group's rendition of the Royal Waltz (the Prince's theme) from the same film that I realized that they are based on the same melody. Because, of course the person who plays Professor Fate is the same person who plays the Prince Because Henry Mancini was a genius.