Thanks for listening! Please take a second and send us an email at MylesMarlow@gmail.com and we’ll keep you updated on the new happenings as well as upcoming free releases. Thanks.
- Myles
#4. FERAL CAT DANCE is a valentine, perhaps not your Hallmark moment, but a valentine in its own rite. Call me a romantic, but FERAL CAT DANCE is a celebration of life and love. Like humans, cats have a fine and ever-changing line between the sounds of love and the sounds of fighting. And these are definitely feral cats, in a world that owes little to humans. My own valentine, Candice, has always liked this tune, and this one’s for her.
From the beginning I knew that FERAL CAT DANCE was generally about cats in an alley. I pictured a tribe of them with a precisely defined but evolving hierarchy. But I wasn’t sure if was about mating or fighting.
One of the problems was it didn’t have a title. That’s not exactly true. It had a series of titles, all of which were quite unsatisfactory. The first title when it was a just a guitar and clarinet sketch was PEEKING AT NAUGHTY PARTS. Don’t ask me why, that’s just how it came out. By the time it was 70- 80% written, it was getting closer with DANCE OF THE UNSPAYED TOMCATS. Clunky and certainly didn’t roll off the tongue, but the idea was close. It didn’t become FERAL CAT DANCE until it was almost finished. It was a huge relief to finally know its name. For some reason it’s vey difficult to finish a piece that has no name.
While writing FCB I pictured the cats dancing in a city alley, in lighting reminiscent of a late 50’s West Side Story alley with long, harsh shadows. In FERAL CAT DANCE there are no humans anywhere, not even in the background. It’s a world populated by cats and I suppose a rat or two. Cats make up all the rules. Dancing, slinking, preening, posturing, watching. Cats running their cat world.
The instrumentation has no brass and no lower strings. At the time, I’d been doing things with a lot of both. So I wanted to solve this one without using either. I also wanted to use a guitar and a synthesizer. The final orchestration includes two synths, a drum set, orchestral percussion (xylophone, celesta, gong), violins, a woodwind ensemble (piccolo, flute, oboe, English horn, clarinet, and of course, bassoon). And a classical guitar played very close to the bridge, almost snapping at the strings. It’s for the cats, after all.
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FERAL CAT DANCE is the fourth of ten tracks released on YouTube and Tumblr for the album, TUNE, by composer Myles Marlow. TUNE is the first album to be released completely, and solely by means of Social Media only, with no physical, digital, or buyable product. Every Monday for ten weeks, a subsequent track, including a new Scot Howard illustration, will be released here.
There’s nothing to buy here, so if you enjoy it, please share it with your friends and link to it on your web pages. We appreciate the support. Here’s a link to cut and paste for the YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuJBD2ujj78 The fifth track will be released here next Monday, February 21, 2011
Illustration by Scot Howard, The Digital Butterfly Project, http://DigitalButterfly.com
(c) 2011, Myles Marlow, All Rights Reserved
—Myles
