The Death Of Ase

I played the cello for about ten years. I never got better at it that much because I didn’t practice it. It was too cumbersome for me to lug home so I avoided it whenever possible. I never took any grades and yet the good graces of the school I went to allowed me to carry on playing until the end of my GCSE’s. I played with the school orchestra. Thankfully for the majority of that time I was surrounded by brilliant performers like Suzanne Cole, Tom Chapman and Karen Carr – names that will mean little or nothing to you unless you were at Wrenn School at the time, but they meant plenty to me.

Anyway, as a performer in the orchestra I got to ‘play’ some interesting compositions. This one never leaves me for all the years since I’ve left the orchestra, it has a haunting quality that I absolutely adore. It conjures up that image of what the death and funereal and funeral march and feel must have been like. During particularly dark times in my life, this tune actually gives me hope that one day I will die and all of this will be over and so it’s actually worth making the most of it and those I love before this tune will be apropos in those situations.

Now, the reason for putting this particular version of a number of YouTube clips up, is because the tune is appropriate for such a journey. It’s all well and good watching an orchestra perform it, but as you go on the journey and notice that like life there is an inevitable end to it which may not always be full of joy and the sentence of death that hangs over our head, then it is understandable why some opt to end the journey early. I maintain, however, that a life well lived is worthwhile and it is that which is always mourned over the most. May our lives be so lived. Enjoy.

da man cd