Scenes are songs are stories
Art forms are not so different
At least at the time of writing this, I just got back from a guitar lesson and listened to selections from Wicked on the way home.
My guitar teacher and I were working on how to use rhythm as a boundary to make a simple song more interesting. His explanation for how rhythm affects the song was the solo from “Stairway to Heaven.”
“If you took out all of the notes and just played it as some atonal thing, it would still sound interesting,” he said.
Plenty of people know the solo. Tap each note that Jimmy Page plays as a dry beat on a table or desk, and it is wild how creative the solo remains without any musicality.
Our discussion about rhythm reminded me of the High on Fire song “Fury Whip,” the album opener on 2007’s Death is This Communion. The lesson was generally focused on conforming your playing to a rhythmic context and not letting lead playing spin out into “bulk food aisle hippy” territory. Your soloing shouldn’t be like a conversation with someone who’s just looking for a warm body to talk at.
All of these subsequent revelations came after weeks of listening to Killing Joke and Godflesh. Both very rhythmic bands.
High on Fire is an extravagant band in their song writing and album production. For many releases, Matt Pike’s lyricism will carry out fantastic, science-fiction narratives that make whole albums theatrical. For Death is This Communion, “Fury Whip” doesn’t act as an overture but a formal introduction to the album—High on Fire has “singles” but they are fun to listen to in the way you might read a novel. It’s not an overture in the sense of including snippets of musical themes that reoccur in the album, but it acts similar.
There are multiple rhythmic themes within the first 1:30 of the song. It begins, and so does the album, with massive chords: strummed once, ringing out, and connected with quick, chugging bursts. These are then magnified by the same progression repeating with Pike punctuating the chugs with octave chords that he bends to invoke a swirling confusion. The intro then descends into Pike playing arpeggios all over the neck, finally reaching a point where the song seems to prepare to jump into the brink, as if we just read the prologue and now we’re in the main story.
High on Fire’s songwriting reflects the grandiosity of their lyricism. Musical compositions create or allude to emotional momentum in the way a film director or a writer may. No matter the art form, the work is holding our gaze in a specific direction and we’re being tugged here, there, over there, by the rhythm, the frame, the paragraph.
What’s interesting to me about Wicked is that the music existed before the physical blocking on stage or screen. The music then has to indicate a visual scene, one that can be interpreted by a stage or film director who is trying to visualize something derived from sound.
There’s a cool video wherein Steven Schwartz, Wicked’s composer and lyricist, explains how he developed the song “The Wizard and I.”
Because Schwartz’s is composing for Idina Menzel, he knows that her strength is to “belt” as he says “because that’s what Idina does.” So he controlled the rhythm and emotional pace of the song to postpone the expectation of Menzel’s belting to the very last moment.
For what it’s worth, listen to “Take Me Or Leave Me” from the original Broadway recording of Rent.
In the second chorus we can here this predilection for belting Menzel has, and we’re all better for it in this world. And that would be some shit if a songwriter said, “I’m gonna make ‘em wait.”
While Schwartz is controlling emotional momentum by controlling the rhythm of “Wizard and I”, he’s also assisting the stage or film director with how to replicate this momentum in a visual context.
In the 2024 film version of “The Wizard and I,” Jon M. Chu creates a visual rhythm of emotional accumulation that we can see as snowballing into some kind of climax. As Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba is running through a wheat field we get glimpses of the climax, but Chu is controlling the force of the scene, supported by the music controlling the force of the song’s equivalent climax. We’re pulled forward into “is this it, is this where it’s gonna happen.” Nope, not yet. “Now?!” Steady. “Now?!?” Almost there. “Now?!”
The “belt,” the musical climax, is like the sonic version of Elphaba overlooking the cliffs and throwing her arms making for the final eruptive note.
A visualization of a cliff face didn’t exist when Schwartz’s wrote the music, but the rhythmic structure of his song provided another artist, Jon M. Chu, with a template for how me may want to visualize the momentum on screen.
It makes perfect sense that a song with no visuals would illuminate a visual artists imagination. Each artist is controlling momentum, rhythm, tension and finally release. We can even thinking of a pop song as conforming to a three-act narrative structure: Setup; Confrontation; Resolution. Verse; Chorus; Bridge.
If you want to continue the discussion, send me an email or put it through the snail mail
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