Blues at Seven

Welcome back to Tea with Liya! For the first song of 2021, I'm playing a song that I composed called "Blues at Seven." The number could refer to 7:00, but it's also a reference to the rhythmic pattern of the song. Another thing I just noticed is that 21 is a multiple of 7, so this is the right year to post this song, too. I hope you like listening to it!


Listen to the song here
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I actually wrote this song before some of the ones I posted this year um, last year. I've got to remember that it's 2021 - it's a good thing that Blogspot automatically sets the publishing date to the day when I was writing this, otherwise I would forget to set the post to be published in 2021. (It's a good thing that I didn't start writing January's posts in December, or I would forget to update the year number for one of them eventually.)

Also, please don't notice that I only published one of my compositions last year, so I had no reason to say "some of them."

So, since you've already read that, you might have started thinking that now is a good time for me to publish another one. I wanted to post this one at an important time, so I decided to make it the first song of the year.

I still remember performing this song last year - yes, it was before the COVID lockdowns. That was an opportunity I would have missed if it hadn't been at just the right time. I should have played the song at 7:00, and then it really would be a blues that was at 7. The good thing about performances that are at 7:00 is that they give you time to sleep. Unfortunately, there aren't that many of them.

No one would survive without this bed to help them.

Maybe I should have used the time signature of 5/4 instead of 7/4, and then I would have been able to play it at 5:00.... Liya is thinking about things and expecting you to understand them...

What you're most certainly asking

Is something I can tell you.

This, in fact, is telling you

"What is the 7 there for?"

You just read some phrases that have 7 syllables in them. There's a pattern that repeats itself on every line. You could use the number 7 to refer to the rhythm of this sentence.

If you then took

the number 7

And brought it down

to only 4,

you'd have a sentence

that looks like this.

This sentence could be described with the number 4. A composer can do the same thing with the songs that they write. They could break up the song into groups of 3, 4, 5, or perhaps even 7. That's why you hear me talking about numbers like 3/4 (the 4 only says what type of note it is, not how many of them there are).

If you look at the music staff in the background carefully, you might see groups of 3 notes separated by lines. I can know that the song has a time signature of 3/4, even if I don't know what song it is.

Most songs have groups of 3 or 4 notes in them, but I decided to do something different with this one, and use groups of 7. Actually, I didn't decide to do it - sometimes I will inadvertently think of melodies while doing random tasks, so I wrote one down, and realized that it used groups of 7. "So, I suppose I'm writing a song in 7/4!"

Maybe I'll write another song in 9/4 (the 9 is just another number, so you could look at it as 3 * 3, or 4 + 3 + 2). However, you'll never find out unless you...

...keep filling your teacup with music!
~Liya