If there are any Official Secrets to Music, these are they:

1.   Tell a Story — this simply means any story about the simple nursery song that you’ve selected for this exercise (such as “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, or “Jack & Jill” or “Sing a Song of Sixpence” — any story will do, including that there isn’t one, ie; a rambling exploration of random notes and measures. Usually it means a story, pure & simple, describing the song’s major points, such as the fact that the farmer lived in a dell, had a wife, many chicks, ducks, geese, horses, cattle, swine, and a couple of wild and crazy dogs with a penchant for handouts. A story like that generally begins with a beginning, goes on a while in the middle, and stops at the end. The MIDDLE part is generally about the obstruction, the pain, the misery or the angst of it all. A typical song story is “my baby done left me”, whether you hear it in blues, folk, pop, ballad, country-western, jazz or classical, it’s always about relationships of one kind or another. That’d be human/human (read as: “human over human”) and bottle/human and a whole chain of seductions that read more or less the same. The story is told verbally before the instrument is sounded. The STORY should NOT take more than 1 minute to tell, especially the “Boy Meets Girl, Girl Gets Drownded, Boy Gets Hanged sort of murder-ballad you’ll find commonly in folk music.

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