We should read music in the same way that an educated adult will read a book:
in silence, but imagining the sound.
- Zoltan Kodaly
When Listening to Music and Hearing Music
Are Not the Same Thing
I just spent the longest hour of my life with, all things considered, the worst smelling human being on the face of the earth. No, I don’t mean this in the sort-of-nice-but-totally-douchey, “It’s funny because it’s true,” sort of way. I mean this in the holy-shit-do-you-ever-shower-oh-forget-I-asked-because-the-answer-is-clearly-no sort of way. I’m not kidding. It smells like this dude washes his ass with his balls, which he washes with the dirtiest pair of gym socks he wears when the air conditioning is on the fritz. It’s the kind of stink when you’re talking to him, and the third word out of your mouth is always, “DAMN!” And you know he doesn’t know he smells bad. He might even think he smells good. He doesn’t. He smells bad in the way that sort makes time feel like it’s slowing down, so that a quick, 30-minute task feels like it took you all goddamn night.
Not un-ironically, Muse’s “Time is Running Out” is blasting from the stereo, and the windows are open, so everyone knows that we are – or at least I am – running out of time. Not only am I running short on the one thing I seem to have the most of, but it’s going by soooooooooo sloooooowly. Even the music seems like it is being played through the stereo slower than normal.
This is what concerns me the most right now. Scratch that. It’s my second concern, behind what my man Cam’ron uses as a washcloth, because I don’t think his wife’s stinky vagina is working anymore. It’s concerning because, to be quite honest, it’s totally weird.
On my way to work a couple of days ago, amidst the worst ear infection I’ve ever had, everything that came out of my car stereo sounded like it was being broadcast 8 clicks slower than it was recorded. You know how when your walkman runs out of batteries, and it plays your tapes slower and slower until whoever you are listening to is singing at half the speed they normally do, and their voice is an octave or so below what it should be? Yeah, that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is the music sounding completely normal, and you’re tapping your foot along, drumming on the steering wheel like you always do, but the tapping and air-drumming just, for some reason, needs to be faster. Do you ever get that feeling? I got it, and I quickly described it (to myself) as “The Weirdest Fucking Thing That Has Ever Happened To Me.”
I tried as hard as I could to shake it. Clearly, the music is fine. If it was too slow, the pitch would change. It’s an electronic file, so the speed can’t really change unless I do it, and I didn’t. But, song after song, it just felt… wrong. I tried driving slower so that my surroundings would appear to pass me at a less than normal rate, and even that didn’t work. It might have made it worse. What caused my brain to think this way, to interpret everything as too slow? Was the sound actually getting to my brain slower, because my ear was so swollen that not even air could get to my brain? Was it because I was getting over a 23 hour shift at work? Was it because I hadn’t eaten? I could not answer these questions, and I still can’t. All I can answer is the question, “Was it the most surreal thing you’ve ever experienced?”
The answer is “No, but it’s close.”
How important is the speed of a song? To be perfectly honest, and to put it into perspective, it wasn’t THAT much slower. It felt slow enough that I noticed, but it didn’t change the character of any of the music. When I got to the 7/8 section of “Era Vulgaris,” things definitely seemed slower, and the pulse of the song definitely felt different, but I obviously have no way of proving that either of those changes had taken place. So, really, if nothing changes except how it sounds to me, in a 100% sonic way, is the tempo of the song really that important?
First of all, yes, it is. Second, what?
In my new favorite documentary Back and Forth, Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters talks about how he wrote the song “Stacked Actors.” “I had a riff idea and a melody, but I didn’t know the tempo. So I jumped up and down, and that became the tempo of the song.” As a person who has jumped up and down to music more than once in my life, I can tell you that jumping too fast is HARD AS SHIT, and jumping too slow is also HARD AS SHIT. When you’re jumping to a song, it’s very easy to tell if it is the right tempo. So, I mean, that’s just a tiny bit of thought into the tempo of one song. The first four bars of the Them Crooked Vultures song “Elephants” are in a tempo that is different from the entire (seven-minute) rest of the song. I have tried over and over to grasp what is going on rhythmically, but all I can tell is that it is slow for four measures, and then “faster” for the rest of the song. When they play it live, the tempo change never misses; there absolutely has to be some sort of ratio between the tempos, or at least some sort of augmentation of the rhythm. That kind of thing is not something that just happens. I mean, it is at first, but if you want to repeat it, I don’t care how good you are, you have to plan it.
But even when you plan it, it doesn’t always go exactly how you want it. Take most instrumental music literature in the past 200 years. Almost every score has some sort of tempo marking at the top of it, many of them very explicit. (Moderato, for instance, is an expression marking, while “mm = 120” is a tempo marking; most scores have at least the expression indicator, and often times both.) If you look at every chart in the JMU Pep Band (Ho) book, you’ll find that at least 80% of them have a tempo marking. I cannot confirm this, because I have not looked in the book in a long time, but I can tell you that when we try to play a tune, and my ass can’t jump up and down (obnoxiously) to the tempo, there is something wrong, and I’m not the only one who knows it. Seriously, the difference between 108 beats a minute and 112 beats a minute is not much, but it’s enough to make me go crazy and start yelling at folks to “quit fucking dragging.” Don’t even get me started on when that shit speeds up *coughdrummerscough*
The 2010 Christopher Nolan film Inception, while not necessarily a great study on lucid dreaming, actually touches on a profound affect of the brain while sleeping. The score for the film, written by Hans Zimmer, is roughly based on an actual piece of music, “Non, je ne regrette rien,” which itself is used throughout the film. I’m sure you’ve seen the videos examining this, and I’m not about to try to explain the plot of the movie to you. But in a nutshell, as characters start to dream, then dream within those dreams, and then dream within those dreams, the music can still be heard. But the further into dreams they go, the slower the music seems to be heard. This actually happens. When we dream, our brain perceives time to go by slower. If we were to dream about dreaming, the elapsing of time for that dream within the dream would be compounded, and would that much slower to our brain. So, when the van takes forever to fall, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt is floating through an elevator shaft, and Tom Hardy is being a total badass, all we can hear is BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAHM. BRAAAAAAAAAAAHM. BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHM. This is potentially how me might actually hear that piece of music, if we were to listen to it, then fall asleep and dream about dreaming about dreaming about listening to it.
Obviously, tempo can have a great, positive effect on music, or it can have a terrible effect on the same music. Ask any person who has written marching band drill to a terrible arrangement of a terrible song. (You could ask my friend Joe, who wrote terrible drill to “Don’t Stop Believin’” for some reason.) There so many things to think about when writing drill, and tempo is one of them. As much as you might want to, there is no way in hell you can spread your legs to 45” (a 4-5 step-size, as we call it) going 148 beats a minute. You can do it at 80 or 90 and still look pretty good, but if you try it too fast you’ll just look like you have Palsy. This is a huge thing to consider when writing drill for, say, a show opener, which is probably right around that tempo. If you need your band to go 40 yards in 20 counts, it’s not going to happen at the tempo you need (want) it to, and the music will sound like it’s dragging. And that’s why, every year at the Parade of Champions, there are at least four bands that I listen to, and the whole time I am bobbing my head up and down, sometimes waving my right hand in a clockwise circle towards my body, trying to speed up the tempo of the music using only my brain. It never works.
That shit didn’t work in my car the other day, either. It never works.
Yes, sometimes music can be slowed down to great effect, but again, if it is not planned, the music – and the audience listening to it – will be affected in a very negative way. One of the coolest things I have ever seen live is Blast!, who open their show with Ravel’s Bolero. Bolero does not change in tempo throughout, at least it shouldn’t. The members of Blast do a good job of keeping the tempo very, very steady. It’s so steady, in fact, that half of the audience will want it just a tad faster, and the other half will want it just a tad slower, but they keep it right the fuck on. But in the last few bars of the piece, they slow it down. The volume increases dramatically, and this somehow makes the huge ritardando that the group does go almost completely unnoticed, and to a great effect. It is most certainly something you would have to hear to understand. If I tried to explain it here, something would almost certainly be lost in the translation, and you would probably think I’m some kind of retard.
Funny story about that. I played a piece called “Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Band or Orchestra,” by a dude named Paul Creston. Now, Paul Creston’s real name is not Paul Creston. It’s Giuseppe Somethingitalian. In this piece, and many others just like it, the composer asks the performer to slow the music down by doing a ritard. Paul Creston, for some reason instead, calls the performer a retard throughout. It’s a long piece. There are lots of retards, and seeing it over and over sort of makes you feel like one. Sort of. I blame it on the Italian thing.
Sometimes it is not the composer who is wrong. Sometimes it is the performer’s interpretation of the music that is in fact incorrect. Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony Number 5 in D minor is four movements in length, which, when done correctly, total about 45.8 minutes in length. When done incorrectly – as is often the case – it totals about 43 minutes in length. I will concede that in the big scheme of things, this is not that much. But in the context of the music, where do those extra three minutes go? They are almost always lost in the Finale, or in the first few bars of the Scherzo. The expression marking at the beginning of the fourth movement, Finale, is Allegro non troppo, which means “quick and lively, but not too fast.” There is no tempo marking. As such, most conductors begin the finale far too fast, and because of that, they always end the piece far too fast, and too quickly. The ONLY tempo marking in the entire symphony occurs at the very end of the finale. That tempo marking is “eighth-note equals 176 [beats per minute].” Upon the symphony’s premier performance, and for most performances that occurred after the premier, that tempo is almost universally changed to “quarter-note equals 176.” I don’t know if you are good at math, but that second one is twice as fast as the first one.
So why did/does this happen, and how great is the effect? The first reason it happened is that Dmitri Shostakovich pissed off a dude named Joseph Stalin. I don’t know if you’re real familiar with history, but that’s bad. Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony was called “a Soviet Artists Response to Just Criticism,” and that is exactly what he needed this symphony to be. But, ever the rebel, he wrote a finale that has a slow, brutal, almost painful ending (at 88 bpm), rather than the quick, lively, triumphant ending (at 176 bpm) that was to be expected. Conductor Yevgeni Mravinsky, being (perhaps too) smart for his age, decided that, since he did not want Shostakovich to die, he would claim that the ONLY TEMPO MARKING IN THE ENTIRE SYMPHONY was a misprint, and the piece would be performed at the faster tempo. Shostakovich, being (probably way) smarter than Mravinsky, did not say a word during rehearsals, and any mention of the tempo of the finale cannot be traced further back than to 1940, 3 years after the premier.
The symphony was, almost obviously, a hit. The ovation that occurred at the premier (Stalin was not in attendance, douchebag) was longer than the performance of the symphony. So, yeah, it’s pretty good, even when it’s done wrong. So how do we know the tempo is wrong? There are two ways. The first is that, as I’ve been talking about, when it is played fast, it just feels wrong. It all happens too fast, the music climaxes and ends before it has any meaning. When you hear it played slowly, you can literally (and I do mean literally) feel the pain that Shostakovich was going through in the summer of 1937. The chords he uses hurt your ears, the constant repetition of one note brings to mind Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and the triumph, joy, and exultation are all completely false. But through it all, through the pain and suffering, you KNOW that if it were to go by any faster, it will have all been for nothing. The ONLY time it goes by at the faster tempo and you still feel what Shostakovich feels is when it is 1996 and Phantom Regiment is playing it in their badass, all black uniforms, and their field commander is crying.
The other way we know is that Dmitri Shostakovich, while smart enough to never come out and say it, has more or less come out and said that the tempo is wrong. “I think it is clear to everyone… what happens in the Fifth,” he once wrote. “The rejoicing is forced, created under threat. It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick, saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’ and you rise, shaky, and go off muttering, ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.’… You have to be a complete and utter oaf not to hear that.” Indeed. (Years later, a Rumanian conductor, Sergiu Celibidache wrote a letter to Shostakovich, asking him “Is the tempo marking eighth-note equals 176 correct?” He received a postcard with a one word response: “Correct.”)
With so much thought that goes into how fast a song should reach your ears, how can I in good conscience allow myself to hear music that is too slow, and just be ok with it? I can’t. I tell you, that drive to work that day was one of the longest of my life. Every song sounded slower than it should have, and not only was it annoying, it almost saddened me that I was unable to interpret the music the way the artist had intended. Musicians have it hard enough as it is, it’ll be a sad day when their music means nothing because the person listening to it has a fucked up brain.
Towards the end of my trip with Cam’ron, “Stockholm Syndrome” came up on the radio. As if it was planned, when that song started, time started to go by again at a fairly reasonable pace. Yes, he still smelled terrible, but at least the music sounded normal again. It was almost as if, since I had been stuck with it for so long against my will that I needed to be stuck in the van, marinating in his funk. Almost. When we got back, and that door finally opened, I said to myself, “THIS IS THE LAST TIME!” I like my music to sound the way it is supposed to rather than too slow, and I like my clothes to smell like laundry detergent rather than dead baby seal. I will, therefore, not be getting into a van with The Stinkiest Person On the Planet again, any time soon, unless I really have to.
God, I really hope I don’t have to.
