Monday Musings: The little notes · 3:42am Jul 28th, 2015
I went to a Disney Karaoke session at a recent convention. It turned out there were no subtitles, and also that I don’t know any Disney lyrics beyond a few lines from “Under the Sea.” (And “Let it Go.” That’s not my fault. What is it about little girls and Frozen? The music isn’t even catchy.)
So I sat back and listened for a bit. Hunchback has some good songs. I’m gonna have to watch that.
A woman got up to do a solo karaoke. She had a great voice. I could tell from her dramatic motions and expressions, her confidence and false modesty, that she was a performer. I could also tell she’d never go beyond doing solo karaoke at cons.
When a big note came, one that you sing loud and long, with lots of vibrato, she’d hit it hard, with expression, gusto, and precision. She put on a show with those big notes.
The little notes, though—the eighth and sixteenth notes in-between the big notes—she slid over. Sometimes she got them right. Sometimes not. They were in her way, keeping her from the big notes. She had the vocal talent I’ve always longed for, and she was pissing it away because she didn’t care about the little notes.
I sat down after the con to blog about this, sure there must be some way this applied to writing. But I couldn’t think how. Good writing deliberately omits most of the little things: driving to work, going to the bathroom.
This weekend I was at another convention, and I got a free sample CD, Horsetamer by Julia Ecklar. I played it on the way home. I got a minute into the first song, then punched “Next”. Thirty seconds into the second song, I punched “Next” again. And again. And again. And then I remembered the little notes.
Julia Ecklar doesn’t want to talk about little things. She recorded a nice version of Leslie Fish’s Darkover song “The Horse-Tamer’s Daughter”:
It’s good. But that’s because it’s different from Julia’s other recordings in 3 ways:
- It’s an original story about an original character not taken from a novel.
- It focuses on the events of a single day, involving one small village and a few people.
- It’s 13 minutes long.
Julia Ecklar sings about big things. She takes a major character from a big novel or series, or one Big Dramatic Event, and tells its story in one six-minute song.
This is a bad idea, especially when the Big Dramatic Event is something you haven’t personally experienced, because… well, just read the lyrics:
So with sun on our steel
And steam that rends the dawn like thunder,
Wolves on our heels,
Reindeer cough and war cries soar.
Hearts beat like drums.
Trollish blood will spill by these hands
For they squat upon what’s ours
And this means war!
Are these the words of a person who rode a reindeer across the tundra, feeling a hundred needles in each breath, her eyes blinded by the white glare off the snow? No. These are the words of somebody who read a Big Dramatic Story and was excited about it. Maybe if you read the same Big Dramatic Story, and were also excited by it, these words would move you. Maybe.
A couple of weeks ago I was in the living room and a news article came on about a terrorist attack in Tunisia. One guy with a Kalashnikov killed 39 people. I saw that, and I felt awful. Because while watching it I realized that I must have left my copy of A Long Way Gone at the supermarket. Now I’d have to order it from Amazon, and wait a week for it to get here. Though, really, I’d already had it for a year without reading it. Still, it cost like six bucks.
I may have thought I cared about the 39 people killed in Tunisia, but I didn’t. Not as much as I cared about my $6 paperback. That was real to me. I had carried it around in my bag for weeks, reading it a page at a time while standing in line at checkout counters.
“But, Bad Horse," you say, "you’re evil.” True. But even you can’t care about everybody in the world. It ain’t natural. People die everyday, lots of them. No tragedy is too big not to be cared about. When was the last time you lost sleep over the Black Death? You know it was real, but it isn’t real to you.
Here are the words to a great song, and a great poem:
The last train is nearly due
The underground is closing soon
And in the dark deserted station
Restless in anticipation
A man waits in the shadowsHis restless eyes leap and scratch
At all that they can touch or catch
And hidden deep within his pocket
Safe within his silent socket
He holds a colored crayonNow from the tunnel’s stony womb
The carriage rides to meet the groom
And opens wide and welcome doors
But he hesitates, then withdraws
Deeper in the shadowsAnd the train is gone suddenly
On wheels clicking silently
Like a gently tapping litany
And he holds his crayon rosary
Tighter in his handNow from his pocket quick he flashes
The crayon on the wall he slashes
Deep upon the advertising
A single-worded poem comprising
Four lettersAnd his heart is laughing, screaming, pounding
The poem across the tracks rebounding
Shadowed by the exit light
His legs take their ascending flight
To seek the breast of darkness and be suckled by the night—“A Poem on the Underground Wall” by Paul Simon
A guy scrawls a bad word on the subway wall. Such a little thing. But it feels real.
It isn’t. People don’t do that. That’s for bathroom stalls. I’ve watched the graffiti all the way along the Amtrak line from DC to Boston and never seen a simple, unadorned cuss word. The subway is reserved for the elite of the graffiti world, and they’ll wipe your stuff in days if it doesn’t measure up. But it feels real, and the scumbag who did it, you feel kind of sorry for him, maybe even share his excitement.
Big is more dramatic, but small is more real.
If you’ve only got 200 words and 6 minutes of song to work with, don’t try to tell an epic tale. Dial it up by dialing it back.
The analogy to little notes in music isn’t as far off as I at first thought. The little notes in between the big notes aren’t arbitrary. They’re notes chosen to lead up to and give context for the big notes, just as you chose the details in a story to support its big events. And the problem with those Julia Ecklar songs about Big Events wasn't just the lyrics; the music had no humble notes. Even the short notes were trying to do the same things as the big notes.
My point isn’t that stories should be about small things, any more than that songs should have only small notes. Read Cold in Gardez’ Lost Cities. Each of those very short stories tells a big dramatic tale. But it tells it entirely with small details, things that would stick in the mind of someone who was there.
My point is that you, the writer, must care about and tell us about some of the small things, the little notes. If you don’t, the big notes will just hang there in space, unsupported, unconvincing. The little notes are what turn them from bombastic to dramatic.
God, I love reading your blogs. They're real to me, you know. Fuck the peeps who give me crap about wasting my life away on this site. I'm living with little stuff like that.
maybe.
Hunchback sucks as a movie, but the music is excellent.
I have no idea.
I got why Aladdin and The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast were huge - they were excellent movies.
I've never understood Frozen. I thought it was very mediocre. Let It Go was like, the only good sequence from that movie (other than possibly the ending - the subversion of the whole true love thing was actually really great. It is too bad that the rest of the movie didn't live up to that at all).
To be fair, Disney was confused as well - they've had to scramble to try and put together stuff for it in their theme park, because you have to strike while the iron is hot.
Poor Norway.
Le gasp! Did you mention The Hunchback of Notre Dame?
I love that movie between it's visuals, the music, and the overall dark tone. But then those talking gargoyle characters had to ruin it. 
It may have the best villain song in a Disney movie. Depending on how you feel about Gaston.
It's actually a pretty decent movie, its just that it's main problem (The gargoyles) can be a really grating one, if the kind of characters they are bother you a lot.
Little details tend to make a big difference in most any art form, really. It can mean the difference between indifference and emotion when looking at a painting, for instance.
My Little Pony seems to be a show about the little notes.
Our blogs synch fairly well this week. Interesting.
With regards to Frozen, I think part of it has to do with offering two "princesses." It lets a girl and her sister or friend each pick one and play them off each other.
With regards to songs about small things, that answers part of question I've been asking myself for a long time. I've always loved story songs, but I've never been able to figure out how they get a whole story into that few words. Part of it is they can develop the tone through music, but some of them don't even focus on that so much ("Rosemary, Lily, and the Jack of Hearts" by Dylan has always been a mystery on that front.) But you're right, they do it by focusing on the details, even in songs that tell a more dramatic or "epic" story (like "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia" or "American Pie.")
So thanks for pointing that out.
3275434 You know, it's interesting, one of my friends was complaining about how she feels the show has lost its slice of life roots, and maybe that's one way of looking at it: the show increasingly focuses on the bigger notes?
Well said. Telling the reader an epic tale starts by convincing them to read the first sentence, the first paragraph, the first chapter…
I've devoured some novels by drinking in all the lovely little details, and then being pleasantly surprised when the bigger story coalesces inside my head.
It works both ways though, doesn't it? Big things contextualize the little things just as much as the other way around. A drunken night at the bar doesn't mean much without the secret ring of doom to protect. Or maybe it's that big things make little things feel dramatic... by contextualizing them.
With any cohesive story, every part is supposed to provide context for every other part. I don't think it means much, if anything, to say that little things contextualize big things in stories.
Is that even true? Do any writers think that every part of a story should contextualize every other part? With any cohesive song, every part is supposed to provide context for every other part. Do composers actually think of music that way? Do painters actually think of paintings that way?
Maybe my definition of a story is too strict. Any good form of persuasion should make a point and make it well, which requires every part of the argument to build up every other part. Maybe it's true that persuasive stories should do the same, as should persuasive music. Maybe a more accurate conclusion would be "You, the writer, if you strive to be persuasive in your writing, should care about and tell us about some of the small things."
I don't have you on Skype speed-dial so I can't tell you I'm in love with you the same way I can tell 3275459 after she posts a blog like this. Except (an' I love you, books) she doesn't post blogs this good. This is among my favorites of things I've ever read here.
I do still love you, books!
3275409
I agree. 'Hellfire' is right up there as a contender for best villain song, but the talky bits of the movie? Ehhh...
3275727
Hellfire is one of the few moments in anything Disney that I can think of that is actually really, really excellent. They're always good at their worst, but that song and the imagery with it are just positively chilling. And then it ends, and you're reminded just how long the movie feels when those thrice-damned gargoyles are onscreen.
This also reminds me of some Disney thing where Rasputin made an appearance as the villain, and he had an excellent song. However, the visuals were cloyingly stupid (dancing bugs or some nonsense), and really didn't fit this dark, growling song about death and decay at all. Forget the name of the film, though. Anastasia, maybe? Did they make that?
Character, I always thought, is best seen in little things. 'Big' things are... well, I've seen some big things[1] and they are too big to fully grasp. You muddle through them. They sound all big and impressive but only in retrospect, you put words and meanings to them only from a great remove and so they lack immediacy. But the little things are wholly yours.
Reading being in many ways a mirroring game, and we mirror the little things better. We know them. And if you make a big thing out of carefully chosen small things, then you let us experience a big thing as we wish we could: clear, memorable, and powerful. And then you have literature.
There's a Leslie Fish song, actually, that does that big-little thing quite quite well, I thought: The Day It Fell Apart[3]. One of my favorites, that.
Also regarding this post, not just the content of it, but also the style and especially the hook of it: Holy hell man, how do you do that. I wish I could write like that. If I consume your heart will I gain your powers? Just asking for, uh, a friend.
[1] I have lived in Interesting Times. I do not recommend the experience[2].
[2] That said, I've not ridden across the tundra, the blood of thousands on my hands, with fire and vengeance in my heart. Honest. I've never stood in the perpetual dawn, the sky tawny and grey, surveying an army waiting for my command. I've not seen the mounted troops the villagers have sent, nor heard the idling rumble of old military diesels turning over, choking on the cold, dense air. The binoculars were not heavy, nor clumsy in my gloved hands, and I never gave the order to fire. I was neither at the hot gates, nor fought in the warm rain, nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, bitten by flies, fought. It's all lies. None of it is true.
[3] Which I always wanted to ponify.
3275612
Bad Horse should totally be in the Skype cuddle-pile. And don't those words just go together? Bad Horse. Cuddle pile.
Perfection.
3275851
That was Anastasia, but that wasn't a Disney film; it was a Don Bluth production for Fox.
3275862
Oh, that makes a bit more sense, given Disney's propensity for creating incredible animation for mediocre movies (and not really the other way around). I watched the film years ago, and that was the only thing about it that stuck with me. I honestly cannot remember the rest.
Please. Yes. This. What you're talking about is granularity. I usually think of it as an oil painting: It needs a few big, bold, sweeping strokes, it's true. But most of it is going to be tiny little daubs that all blur together into a pleasing gradient. If all you use are the big lines, you won't see a painting. You'll just see a bunch of lines.
You know what my favorite thing is? When a story tries to pull you in by threatening to exploadinate TEH WHOLE DAMN WORLD! Ohnoes, *I* live on teh world: therefore, this affects me! Therefore, I should care!
I love how in The Expendables 2, the main character's only real reason for going after the bad guy is to get some revenge. After a certain point, it feels like they don't even care about the 200 tons of weaponized plutonium kicking around. It's practically background color. Selling a million atomic bombs to terrorists is just too nebulous to wrap our heads around. Revenge for a murdered friend, though... that's as personal as it gets.
See what you made me do, Bad Horse? I referenced one of the dumbest movies in human history as a positive literary example. I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY
But not as dumb as Transformers 2. I've never walked out of a theater before in my life, and I'm personally ashamed of myself for not having started right then and there. What a wretched thing is man.
If you actually enjoy The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the movie will give you fits. It's Disney excess and revisionism post-Lion King at its worst, tackling a project way too big for itself and then adding comic sidekicks and futzing with the ending until the theme of the original is unrecognizable. They've also changed the primary antagonist from "a priest" to "a judge" while changing literally nothing else about his demeanor or thematic so you keep thinking of him as "that priest guy." Presumably this was done to avoid people complaining.
Taken in isolation, the songs are reasonably cool and the visuals are nice. But the message and execution remain problematic.
Not much to say about the blog post because I agree with it pretty much in its entirety; I think one may be excused for telling the huge bombastic story when that's the point of the story. What you describe is a path to classically good writing, but there are some unconventional types of good writing out there as well which break the rules and still manage to be amazing. But for most authors and most muses, I think you're right on.
3275415 Let It Go is a lovely song, in my opinion, but I wish it hadn't become the musical face of the film, because the whole point is that Elsa is horribly, horribly wrong when she sings it.
I guess "Let It Go" sticks out because A. be honest, it was the only song in the whole movie that managed to get anywhere near memorable, and B. it was an interesting very-nearly-villain song. That whole scene was really powerful, and only a small dark edge removed from ending on a glorious "Muahahahaaa!"
Oh, absolutely. That's the difference between reading a history book, and the personal diary of a soldier in the trenches. The first might tell the facts... but it's the second which tells a story.
3275858
Good heavens, people who actually knows Leslie Fish songs! And yes, The Day It Fell Apart is an excellent one... and Leslie is very good at dealing with the small stuff. One of her songs, Chicasaw Mountain, is arguably about this very choice, as perhaps exemplified by the lines, "...sing second best, but sing long / and have always one more song." I've talked with her about it, and it was very much her choice always to have more to say. And especially in the context of this post and the comments on it, I'm realizing even more now how regularly her songs are about small things that reflect, satirize, or point at the big things.
And that may be why I have so many Leslie Fish CDs and only one by Julia Ecklar. I, like Bad Horse, like that approach better.
Light and laughter,
SongCoyote
Am I the only one here who unreservedly loved just about every single bit of Frozen? Like, not in an ironic way either? Who thought it was the best-constructed and written thing Disney had put together in ages?
Just me?
3276214 From what I understand, the original plot of the movie was quite different until that song was written and sung for the writers. They supposedly changed the story to match the song, which is quite different than things normally go.
3276898 I'm a old cranky father of four, and I adored Frozen. Although my children will not let me sing the songs in the house, and the dog howls when I try to sing outside.
3275858
"The great things simply are what they are. They give no suggestion to the artist."
That's a bastardized quote from Wilde: he was talking about beautiful things, not great ones. But I think his rule still applies.
3276797
Oh, I absolutely love Leslie Fish. I shouldn't know about her, by rights, being entirely too young and too foreign to, but I somehow ran into her stuff on the 'net and I found it absolutely excellent. There's an air of genuine passion, eccentric, quirky, and utterly unique about her. I do not know to which extent, if any, it is a product of artifice, but I enjoy it all the same.
3276898
I didn't utterly adore it or anything, but I did not feel insulted by the movie in any way and I enjoyed watching it. Unironically. I wouldn't know how to enjoy something ironically if you gave me a diagram how to do it, an instruction manual, and six weeks' practice in some elite hipster boot camp.
I mean, there's plenty wrong with it, like how the start of the movie is totally an idiot plot and all that, but it is fun, well animated, and subverts the hell out of the Twoo Wuv trope.
3277115
A very apropos quote all the same. And, yeah, I think the observation holds even past literature. I mean, consider all the great words and pithy observations said at some momentous occasion which turn out to have been sent ten years later. Or all the last words[1] which turned out to not have been quite last. We only appreciate the great—terrible and wonderful, hideous and beautiful—from a remove.
Makes sense. You need to step back from big things to take 'em all in, after all.
[1] I've picked mine already! "A treasure! Gems! Rubies! Pearls! Gold! It's hidden behind the—"
I think you really put your finger on why I haven't listened to much filk in years.
But there was a time when I would've been utterly swept away by:
Now I see that and all I can think of is:
pvponline.com/images/blog/hammer_time.jpg
You get older, your tastes change. But no one should condemn or make apologies for liking their blood thick and their thunder loud while they happen to be young. It's natural to that passage in life, which you only get to make once so why not take full advantage?
(Although "reindeer cough" comes off a bit anticlimactically. "Cry" or "moan" would be better though I'm not sure they do either. But "cough" just conjures up the image of a fur-clad veterinarian with a latex glove on one hand)
EDIT: Other'n that, it could almost be death-metal lyrics...
" 'Reindeer cough?' Who da f*ck wrote DAT line dere? Skwisgar?" "Don'ts looks at ME! Dats was TOKI!"
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3276898 I liked a lot of things about Frozen, especially that there was no Disney villain. The ending was pretty good. The lyrics to "Let it Go" are good. But the music... I did not like. It isn't singable. You have to be a professional to sing "Let It Go" in a non-irritating way. Even then it's pop. Especially the instrumentation.
3275422
It is hard to beat Gaston's song.
Or Kill the Beast, for that matter.
Honestly, Gaston is pretty much my favorite Disney villain. He's just so gloriously terrible.
3275727
Yeah... that movie's songs were its high points. Really, it has a lot of good songs... and... yeah.
I still love the Court of Miracles song... which is pretty much a villain song as well, really.
Of course, that's one problem with the fridge logic of that movie - while genocide is clearly bad, Frollo is clearly right that a lot of the gypsies are up to no good.
3276214
It is good news for future recruitment for the Evil League of Evil, though!
3277467
Ha! Artifice? No no no - not Leslie. She's one of the more real people, and real performers, that I know. I've had the pleasure of spending a fair bit of time with her, and even have a copy of her traveling songbook (i.e. the 3" lyrics binder she uses when going to cons and such) and have sung with her many times.
Her approach is sufficiently skilled and genuine that, many years ago, when she only had a dozen or so of Rudyard Kipling's poems set to music, she approached the Kipling estate and asked their permission to record them. They basically said yeah, do it, and keep doing it, for as long as you like, because we love what you do with them; just make sure people know they're Kipling's words. She did, and has continued to do so, and sends the estate a few copies of each album she produces.
I could go on, as she is to me both a revered creator of music and a friend, as well as the reason I have had the temerity to name myself a Bard. But I think you get the idea
Light and laughter,
SongCoyote
3277632
I would disagree on one point. The beginning song, "Frozen Heart." It's short, easy to memorize, and not very difficult to sing. It also has a more folksy quality to it compared to the rest.
You are right about the rest of the music, mostly. I Enjoy the music in Frozen a great deal, but it is not singable, particularly.
3275727
I really liked Hunchback for the most part. The only thing I didn't like much were the gargoyles. The german version did it right I think, in portraying them as a product of Quasi's isolated psyche. They were completely cut from the climax, once it got into full swing.
Now that's just not true. I've had that song stuck in my head for days until I was filled with the desire to bash it on a hard object until it cracked open and let the music out, leaving me with sweet peace.
That's the definition of catchy.
Of course, the real reason little girls like it is because it's a song about being oppressed because you're special and throwing off societal constraints.
EDIT:
Wait, was this your real complaint?
3277632
Neither being hard to sing nor being pop impact that (indeed some truly detestable pop songs are annoyingly catchy). Maybe we have different definitions of the term?
I hope scheduling allows me to catch your panel, Horse: in mine I'll be talking (as always) about the process of 'setting up' things, talking about it a lot.
This is what the little notes are for. In the Chopin arpeggio, the rippling lower notes provide the shape upon which the chiming top notes define a little melody like the crest of a wave. It's those which stand out and glitter, but they depend on the underlying arpeggio for context.
I'm going to be talking about the times when you put effort into writing stuff that is SUPPOSED to go unnoticed because there's a purpose it serves. I'm going to be talking about the times you focus on the little notes and on placing them just right, knowing they're not meant to become big notes, and what is gained by that discipline.
Well, WELL spotted, good (sorry, evil) Horse.
As always I've had to edit this comment thrice because little notes were missing…
3278741 I couldn't get it stuck in my head, because I can't remember more than a few bars from it. I have a very bad memory, and I can't remember music unless it's very structured. I never remember what comes after "Let it go!"
3277729
You and me and Ghost should get together and, I dunno, go bowling or something.
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"STFU Ed, you're out of your league."
3279197
That just makes it worse, when I can only remember a tiny piece of a song, since I get sick of that even faster, (though I can usually remember several verses in the case of "Let it go". The next words depend on which verse is following the refrain, usually the one that pops into my mind is "something something with the wind and sky let it go let it go something something cry").
Anyway, this does seem like a personal difference. I'm not even sure what 'structured' means in context of music and I suspect most people (or at least most little girls) are similar, so it's unlikely to be a major component in 'catchiness'.
3279849
As an avid bowler I completely approve of this plan. Let's add xjuggernaughtx, too; I've had some rather interesting conversations with him and think he'd have some good things to say.
Of course, any said get-together is predicated on it occurring in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, as I haven't the time or budget for travel any time in the near future. But I wouldn't be sorry to see it happen!
Light and laughter,
SongCoyote
3277467
I've never seen Frozen, which leaves a great gap in my memeducation as it seems to be all over the place these days.
I'm a little reluctant to watch it now because...well, it's just a cartoon meant to sell toys to little girls, right?
3280210
And when has one of those ever been good?
I can recommend it. It will amuse. It does need more ponies, obviously. But it is the only children's movie I know of that has the word 'fractal' in it. That has to be worth something, surely?
3279897
I can't say what it means, but I can feel it. Structured music follows a plan. Rock and country music are structured and simple: verse+refrain; I-IV-V chords; follows some poetic meter. Beethoven and Bach are structured and complex: the same motifs repeated differently in different sections or movements, in a pattern designed to have a dramatic structure analogous to a story's plot, where discordant notes are analogous to conflict and resolving chords are analogous to resolutions. Handel is structured but not as complex; the structure is dictated by convention, rather than by dramatic logic as in Beethoven. Jazz, Mozart, Renaissance music, a lot of tribal music, and Frozen follow the tune more than making the tune follow their structure. (Mahler and Schoenberg are just dicking around and accomplishing neither.)
3280224
That does seem like something that isn't going to be related to catchiness for most people. All it takes is one particularly earworming refrain to get a piece of a song stuck in someone's head, whereas you seem to be looking at the shape of the song as a whole according to some sensation of narrative.
It's an interesting concept, though. Is this something you heard of somewhere or a personal creation to explain your experiences?
3280337 Composers talk about musical structure. I mean to talk about the same thing, but since I don't know much about music theory, I don't know if I am.
3280558
Sadly, I'm not an expert either, so I can't be sure but I suspect you're working off an idiosyncratic definition of the term, based on your personal experiences. That doesn't necessarily make it invalid, though.
Oh and, as an aside, always good to meet another Simon & Garfunkle fan.