Because this blog is supposed to be about the creative process and how it fits into my spiritual perspective, I must report that I had another mysterious experience of affirmation and synchronicity that validated, for the time, my path.

As I probably have mentioned many times, I wrote a number of tunes “in my head” while I was walking about the notorious college community in which I once attempted to live.  I had no computer in those days, and I’ve never been very good at writing by hand.  So I kept track of all the different parts in my mind and resolved that when I was better off I would obtain a computer and notate the music using my Finale software.  One such song is Bubbles Taboo.

If you bothered to click on that link, you no doubt noticed that it led to a song of standard studio length, approximately three minutes long.  But it was supposed to involve both a lengthier introduction and a substantial instrumental break prior to the recapitulation of the main theme.  I just hadn’t gotten around to sequencing those sections at the time.

The instrumental break involved many modulations – so many that I had never even bothered to count them until tonight.  Their number is twelve.  Observe:

C  – G – F – C – Bb – F – G – A – G – D – G- C

See?  Twelve separate keys.  (Now some of those keys might be more majory than minorish, but since they’re all bluesy, I left out those details.  If you’re a musician, you probably understood that statement.  If you are not a musician, you probably aren’t reading this blog.)

Not only did I have no idea how many modulations were involved, but I also had no idea what key I was going to wind up in.  But look: I wound up in the same key – C – from which I started.   Now what are the chances of that?  Since there are twelve tones in the chromatic scale, the chances are one out of twelve.  In other words, the odds are eleven to one against it.

If you don’t believe me, check it out.   The break with the twelve modulations takes place between 3:50 and 5:00 on this 5:36 clip. 

“Bubbles Taboo”

Copyright © 2016 by Andrew Michael Pope.
All Rights Reserved.

See?  It lands on the same key it started on, the key of C, after all those modulations.  Ir could have landed on any other key – but it landed on C, against the odds.  But that’s not all.

What are the chances that the number of keys in the break would be the same number as the number of pitches in the scale; that is to say, the number twelve?  Or that the mystic-laden break would end at exactly 5:00, for that matter?  Quickly, things becomes astronomical.

Although there is a chance that it is all a coincidence, isn’t there a far greater chance that this was on some level the process of elegant unconscious creative incubation, or – better yet – a manifestation of divine principles?   I hold the latter to be self-evident.  Music, as I will attest to my dying day, is a Manifestation of the Divine.