Nostalgia from School Songs

Okay, a post at stupid o'clock is probably not as fun as it might be. So here's something a little bit more nostalgic.

In Singapore, we have schools, and schools have school songs. These are something akin to the national anthems, except at the scale of the schools instead.

The one thing that we don't usually talk about is how we usually sing them every day at the start of the school day---no pop song even survives this level of intensity. With that, of course, comes some serious nostalgic vibes. To me, this nostalgic feeling is really quite agathokakological (my new favourite word after defenestration)---there is the good of something familiar from a time long ago that was a part of my childhood, but there is also the somewhat bad of the levels of conformity that have been ingrained from a very young age by this specific society that I grew up in.

Anyway, I brought this up because I had been digitally remastering the lead sheets of the school songs, because I can.

First up is from my primary school. For reasons of avoiding getting smacked down with automated copyright take downs, I will refrain from naming the school in writing (it is in the image though, so see for yourself and nod your head quietly).

This is circa 1997. The school song is printed behind the front covers of the old A5-sized ruled writing books that had brown covers with the school crest up front. This one was remastered from one of those old [thin] writing books that I found while I was spring cleaning and preparing my shelf to finally reclaim my own space at home.

This next one was only remastered today.

This is circa 2001, and is from the speech day booklet. The original quality was terrible---it seemed like a facsimile of a facsimile of the original handwritten version that was handed down through the ages. The lyrics were hand-written (not a problem), but the staves had poor definition, with note heads, accidentals, and stems a smeary mess. It is the most sophisticatedly set up lead sheet, since it actually has four-part harmony on it. I could have improved on the remaster by combining rests and maybe reducing the fermata to only appearing once per clef, but it feels a little too much effort. I remember that every time we sang this school song, we always ended up about an octave higher, and that the feel of this piece was less rousing and more like some drunken poet reciting his poem, which is probably less far away from the truth than expected (except maybe for the drunken bit).

The final one is from the time I was in junior college.

This had a full concert band backing it ``live'' on Fridays(?) when we would assemble in the school hall for the morning assembly. I think it actually shares the same song as the affliated secondary school with it. I have had lots of interesting and happy times at my junior college, even volunteering to return for nearly two years after that while I was serving out my national service to train up the existing students for competitive programming at the National Olympiads in Informatics, and even the National Software Competition (NSC) held by Singapore Polytechnic, though the format of that competition now is different from the past (and so I'm not linking to them). The old NSC was more like the ACM ICPC, but geared towards secondary school students instead of undergraduates in that one fielded a three-person team and with one computer to program on using languages of the team's choice. In the old days, it was a choice of [Turbo] C, Microsoft QBasic, or [Turbo] Pascal, but it then evolved to also include Java. The competition was very algorithm-heavy, with speed as a major factor as well.

Anyway, nostalgia is just a rose-tinted window to the past. There are lots of good things there to reminisce fondly, but there are also many, many bad things from the past that I would rather not remember, except for the fact that they too have contributed to the me that is today.

It is said that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, but I think that it is more of a case of how we, both individually and as groups/mobs, have certain thought patterns that keep recurring in an imperfect manner. Some of these thought patterns are beneficial to us, but there are some that are not, either through context or otherwise. In either case, ``knowing/remembering history'' is less about memorising the details of what had happened, but about being made aware of the thought patterns that one had gone through then, together with their consequences.

That last paragraph is important to myself because as I am starting to re-discover who I am, really, it is important to not fall into the traps that un-mindful thinking would lead me to due to the old thought patterns.

As I might have pointed out before, it is really seductive to just hermit up and ignore the world outside; as weakly introverted-dominant thinker, this temptation is real. But it is not beneficial to future-me---mostly because I am not rich nor powerful enough to continue to stay hidden from the world this way. Despite the treachery of the world, it is impossible to stay completely segregated from it, since I live right smack in the middle of an urban city, and have the ``highest skill levels'' [relatively] in things that require working at so-called higher industries.

Unless of course if I off myself. Then all these things are academic in nature and have no other use. =)

But no, suicide is distinctively off the menu.

I just realised that I have not actually played any video games in a while, having defaulted to doing more reading and pursuing other semi-random geeky interests. Maybe I should rectify that.

Just maybe.