Sturm und Drang

Every book ever written about music tells us that music creates stress and then returns to comfort.

We can see this in Mary above. Think of the staff as a ladder and and Do as the ground. Any time we get back to Do we can relax. When we're part way up the ladder, it gets tense.

We can see that even this painfully simple song starts off by throwing us a curve. We're already up in the air at the start and we're going down. How far down? We don't know until we get to Do. But then it starts climbing again and it goes up and up until it hits So at the end of the third bar. Then it climbs back down to safety.

And we can see that that splits into two phrases of three bars each. One takes us somewhere strange and high and the other brings us back to safety.

It's worth remembering that pattern, by the way. As we go along we might want to ask ourselves what is so special about Do and So. Music theory gives these two notes names: the Tonic and the Dominant. That's probably not an accident that they have such significant sounding names.

Anyway, the other thing is that it isn't just the music it self that tenses and relaxes. So does the person playing it and that is a bad thing. Playing music isn't like method acting.  We don't express stress better musically when we are heavily stressed. And being to relaxed just means we are more likely to make mistakes.

I read a piece by a classical guitarist once about this that is interesting. He (I can't remember his name) noted that people flub the easy bit that comes right after a difficult bit just as often as they flub the difficult bit. It's easy to see why this happens. We're floating along through an easy bit but we know that a difficult bit is coming. So we concentrate and we make it thorough, heave a sigh of relief and them miss an easy note we ought to be able to play easily.

The trick, and I haven't got it yet, is to play with the same level of controlled tension throughout.


PS: The title means storm and stress. Classical music eggheads talk about it a lot. Part of the reason for using it is that some day someone is going to Google "sturm and drang" and "ukulele" and they'll get this post. That sort of thing amuses me.