A Matter Most Tragic

The album’s grandest exercise in theatrical despair finds Seraphino lamenting the sameness of modern music with swashbuckling orchestra, choir, trumpet fanfare, and heroic self-importance. Its large dynamic sweep turns a familiar complaint into comic opera: if originality is endangered, Seraphino is prepared to rescue it personally.

A small grievance may be spoken. A great grievance requireth brass.

I conceived A Matter Most Tragic as a lament too magnificent for the complaint it carrieth. The subject is repetition: melodies copied from copies, novelties assembled from exhausted designs, and audiences praising recognition as invention. Rather than answer this sameness with restraint, I chose fanfare, choir, rolling sea-rhythm, and the full navigational authority of a captain steering art away from familiar waters. The recording’s wide dramatic course—from declaration through mock tragedy into triumphant finale—alloweth the satire to grow until it nearly becometh sincere.

Nearly, I say, because beneath the spectacle resteth a conviction I do not consider comic. Originality is not the invention of notes no human hath heard; such a demand would leave us chiefly with accidents. It is the courage to arrange inheritance into a voice recognizably one’s own. The song mocketh derivative music, certainly, but it also defendeth the labor of making choices rather than merely repeating outcomes. If I appear to cast myself as the lone guardian of this principle, remember that modesty would have required a smaller orchestra.