More Music to Move To: Janelle Monae's "Tightrope"

National Public Radio reported last year on the “Anatomy of a Dance Hit,” explaining a Danish study’s findings that “danceable grooves have just the right amount of gaps or breaks in the beats,” inviting first our brains, and then our bodies, to supply these missing links in the pulse. A pop favorite that has stood (at least my) test of time nails this “moveable music” criterion: Janelle Monae’s “Tightrope,” one of a series of programmatic songs on her 2010 science-fiction-themed album The ArchAndroid. 

The musical style blends Motown, hip-hop, and an unclassifiable but perfectly melded complement of driving percussion—most prominently, congas, kick-drum, and a drum-machine bass kick—acoustic instruments, and brass ensemble. Monae is among the most charismatically expressive singers I know of: aggressive, plaintive, brash, sweet—and always energetic.

And most to the point, the song is riddled with gaps. Holes in its beat that effectively grab you by the wrist and drag you to the dance floor. From “Tightrope’s” opening bars, I defy you to sit still. Trust me—it is much easier (and so much nicer) to give way to your tapping feet and wiggling hips.

Music to Move To

Taking a page from my students’ notebooks, I return to a favorite topic. Kids variously call it tunes, beats, bars, choons.... however their slang for it evolves, its own language never needs translation.

So, today—music that quickens my pulse, fourteen years after the first listening:

Paul Hindemith, Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber (1943)

I first encountered Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis as a student at Eastern Music Festival in Greensboro, North Carolina in 2001.  I had the rare privilege (for me) of being principal second violin that week, so most of my evenings were spent listening to the CD while marking bowings and cues.

Hindemith’s music infected me from the first note. Its vaguely psychedelic remix of Weber’s nineteenth-century melodies, its sonic color splashes and razor-sharp rhythms, gripped mind and body—it was agonizing to restrain my foot-tapping during rehearsals and performance. He tricks out Weber’s phrases in full-throated twentieth-century harmonies, jazz syncopation, and jubilantly wide-ranging instrumentation. His methods of “metamorphosing” Weber’s music vary, but one of my favorites occurs at the end of movement two.  Here, Weber’s melody line gorgeously decomposes— or rather, it is lovingly dismembered: the timpani makes the first real cut, tossing around hunks of melody line before ceding them to the woodwinds and other percussionists, who atomize the phrases into just-recognizable fragments (11:30 in video - performed by the Orquestra Sinfonica do Estado de Sao Paulo).

Cross-Compositional

I spent my first five undergraduate semesters studying music.  Though the program was performance-track, I had many opportunities to write, and almost always about music. I wrote about the competing "dictates of structure and expressivity" for a paper on George Rochberg's third string quartet (which, in my youthful assessment, "retains the serialist aesthetic of condensed motivic content and recontextualizes it in the more accommodating space of stylistic eclecticism..." a claim that is somewhat difficult to read now with a straight face). I researched American immigrant music; I investigated twentieth-century composers' fascination with clowning and puppetry. I also reported on the musicological experience of browsing a local used record shop. These were rich and varied writing experiences, and I had forgotten until recently the pleasures of describing music's structure and aesthetics, of considering the social and emotional impacts of the choices composers make.

My students also enjoy writing about music. It is among the top subjects they choose for their independent writing entries. They praise music's uncanny versatility as an emotional amplifier or buffer, and students' favorite songs and artists become proxies for their most passionate feelings and opinions. "I cannot live without my music," their journals chorus.

It is a cognitive feat to translate complex emotional reactions and aesthetic judgements into words. I will more deliberately encourage this topic of writing with my students next year-- and produce some new music writing of my own this week. Already in the running: Janelle Monae, Paul Hindemith, Lupe Fiasco, and Sergei Rachmaninoff.