By The Landlord
Molecular structure to the intricate whorl of shell shapes, spiralling birds’ nests to twisting tree structures, uniform buildings to weather-worn mountains, from our own eyes to the shape of nebulae far beyond our skies, the universe is entirely made of repeated patterns. Patterns are in everything we do – in our habits and behaviour, our history, how we express ourselves, in our language, in our genes. And the very fabric of music contains all kinds of patterns - chord shapes, riffs and repeated melodies, but this week we’re looking in particular for how this is shown in lyrics - for example in songs with lists with an element of repetition or expansion, and in songs where numbers come in sequences. One, two, one, two? Let’s go beyond this, let’s see what we can discover behind the wallpaper.
So what is a pattern? A repeated decorative design certainly, but it's also a regular and intelligible form or sequence discernible in the way in which something is done. But let's look into this definition more clearly ...
To explain more, this theme brings all kinds of clever people together for a swift pint in the Song Bar. “To understand is to perceive patterns,” says the writer Isaiah Berlin. “Intelligence is the ability to take in information from the world and to find patterns in that information that allow you to organise your perceptions and understand the external world,” says the theoretical physicist and string theorist Brian Greene. Perhaps, in some form, we are all looking for the single equation. “People look for patterns in everything. It’s what keeps us sane,” remarks Michael Palin with a laconic smile. “History repeats the same conceits …” says Elvis Costello, grinning and pulling out his guitar with a flourish on our mini stage. “Oops, I did it again,” says Britney Spears. How so, Britney? …
That's right. This week let’s also look at songs that that pick up on patterns of behaviour, which, let’s face it, usually, point to mistakes and falling back in the hole. But if you’re going to repeat this pattern, you might as well do it with style, in this rather fetching version of doing it again by Max Raabe recently suggested on this very website:
Fundamentally though, this week, rich pickings are likely to come in the form of songs where lyrics express a pattern in the form of a list, and there are many sources of these on t’internet. One of the maestros of this form was Tom Lehrer, who cleverly brought science, poetry and music together with inspiration from Gilbert and Sullivan:
This example doesn’t just contain a list, but down to molecular level, is also rich in numbers. You can find numerical content all over the lyrical canon. From an early age we are taught to recite numbers in times tables, and while painful to learn, especially for bunch of screaming primary school kids, they somehow end up pleasing to our ears in later life, so they are bound to come out in lyrics too.
Let’s not forget, also, that mathematics and music are closely aligned, from counting in to shaping theme and structure. Greene just loves it at the Song Bar. He’s got a bit more to say here: “What makes a Beethoven symphony spectacular, what makes a Brahms rhapsody spectacular, is that the patterns are wondrous.” The link continues: “All mathematics is is a language that is well tuned, finely honed, to describe patterns; be it patterns in a star, which has five points that are regularly arranged, be it patterns in numbers like 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 that follow very regular progression.” And as the number theorist GH Hardy puts it: “A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.”
Now let’s get back to some musical examples. While Lehrer is brilliant craftsmen with rhythmic lists, songwriters use such list and patterned lyrical forms to tell a story. Check out how Neil Hannon in the Divine Comedy uses what is basically a sequential list to build up an emotional picture of confused melancholy:
Tom Waits also wrote a rather different song called Gin-Soaked Boy, but that’s not just a cheeky segue. Harking back to Elvis Costello above, who also sings in the same song, “So in this almost empty gin palace/ Through a two-way looking glass/ You see your Alice”, let’s sample Waits’ own masterpiece, Alice, in which he doesn’t use a list form, but shows a pattern of another type, not only in behaviour, but how he is inextricably and tragically drawn to Alice, outlined in the shape of the letter ‘A’ on the ice of the pond. Patterns on all levels. Brilliant.
Music’s patterned forms are a subject so rich and complex it would take a lifetime to study them, even more to suggest examples, so this week’s theme is strictly lyrical. But for the hell of it, let’s enjoy just a few patterns and shapes in other forms. Terry Riley pipes up now about his oeuvre: “My contribution was to introduce repetition into western music as the main ingredient without any melody over it, without anything just repeated patterns, musical patterns.”
So with a pattern for pattern’s from Terry to Bridget Riley, who highlights a theme of searching for something: “As the artist picks his way along, rejecting and accepting as he goes, certain patterns of enquiry emerge.”
But what does the artist look for in patterns, and what is their method? The playwright Peter Shaffer admits, rather candidly, that it can be a haphazard process: “I discover what I mean as I write. That can be both terrifically exciting and very dangerous, because when you look at your words later, you wonder, 'Did I really mean that, or am I just making verbal patterns?’”. Patterns somehow come out of chaos. Andrew Bird says “my head is full of shifting patterns and polyrhythmic stuff”, out of which he aims to use “acoustic instruments to create this tapestry of interlocking, lulling parts”. And the ballerina Margot Fonteyn describes the disorder of patterns we can barely grasp: “Life forms illogical patterns. It is haphazard and full of beauties which I try to catch as they fly by, for who knows whether any of them will ever return?”
Fonteyn, as she herself flew through the air, captures something very important here about the nature of patterns. If there is one book about this whole subject I’d recommend it’s the brilliant The Artful Universe by the astronomer John D Barrow, in which he analyses the universal shapes that span our lives, not only in visual structure in nature, biology, history and art, but also in music, even that which “emanates from the human body”. But fundamentally he says: “The laws of nature are based upon the existence of a pattern, linking one state of affairs to another; and where there is pattern, there is symmetry. Yet he symmetries that the laws enshrine are broken in outcomes. Such 'symmetry-breaking' governs much of what we see in the Universe... It allows a Universe governed by a small number of symmetrical laws to manifest an infinite diversity of complex, asymmetrical states. This is how the Universe can be at once, simple and complicated.”
So in music, lyrics and all forms, we are searching for sense, and symmetry out of that chaos. That’s what a song is for. And that is why we make lists, and look for sequences. Fractal images making order out of that chaos may seem modern, but as the cyberneticist Ron Eglash says, “While fractal geometry is often used in high-tech science, its patterns are surprisingly common in traditional African designs.” We also see that with Van Gogh above. But what has been around even longer are the patterns of bird song, so now let’s enjoy a little to close:
This week’s lieutenant of the lyrical list and sergeant of the sequential number is the terrific takeitawayGuru, so please suggest your songs on this topic in comments below for a deadline called later on Monday for playlists published next Wednesday. Now for the next on my list …
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