If you’re a singer fronting a band you have to count them
in. You set the tempo for each number;
pulling the musicians together to conduct the ebb and flow of the songs and the
set. It’s one of the most important
things you do, because if you don’t capture the right tempo, the right mood and
attack, your rehearsed interpretations will not hit their mark.
There are many parallels: the captain of a yacht plays
with the angle of his boat to ride or resist the speed of the wind; dancers
glide through a waltz, kick through a cha-cha, and sass through a tango but
without the right tempo it won’t be convincing.
Rhythm is just as present in sport: rugby and tennis players
change tempo to throw their opponents off guard, and when they find the opening
they’ve been looking for, they hammer a beat relentlessly to get the ball over
the line.
Lovers also mix up the tempo of play. Well, I hope they do!
As to the music, when the tempo is perfect and a band is really
hooked into one-another... musicians borrow from billiards to say it was “in
the pocket” – meaning not only that they brought the track home but that it was
comfortable, the music flowed how and where it should have.
So often in life the harmony of tempo and place is what
we’re looking for. Yet so often it’s
just a wee bit off, like a distorted radio station – or worse – a singer or
violin slightly out of tune. When things
are flowing at the tempo in which they are organically meant to be (and that is
different for everyone in a million different circumstances) there is usually a
greater sense of peace, of being at home, or perhaps being on holiday. Indeed it’s in those sweet moments of good
alignment that we may not even notice tempos changing around us because,
whatever the speed, we’re flowing in a comfortable groove.
Yet alignment and perfect tempo setting is harder to
achieve in our modern world than it used to be.
Life is so often fast whether or not it’s reasonable or desired. We text
and expect an immediate response. We
email and presume it’s been read. We
rarely ponder over a ‘real letter’, sending thoughts that have been carefully
considered and matured. We tease and
procrastinate about where we’re going and what we’re doing, often leaving
social engagements until the last minute so as to keep our options open. Yet I remember a time when you said “I’ll
meet you at Piccadilly Circus at 7pm Saturday week...” and that’s where you
went because you’d promised that you would.
You didn’t have a mobile phone to change arrangements.
One could argue that the world now has ‘fast’ as a
default, and that is no better or worse than an old world where perhaps it was
too often stuck on ‘slow’. Perhaps.
But for many reasons it makes me wonder about our ability
to know which ‘play’ is the right one for the moment. When is a ‘fast play’ or a ‘fast decision’ advisable?
When is the ‘long play’ likely to reveal
a better result? And if our big-city, global-world tempos are
stuck on ‘fast’, with sub-titles screaming “I want it now”, are we losing our
ability as a society (or a workplace, a family, a group of friends) to even
notice when we’re getting it wrong?
Thoughts about tempo have come to me after attending an
exceptionally good wedding last weekend in a country hotel in Surrey. A dear friend was marching up the aisle (or
rather, waiting for his bride to do so) and as their engagement was short many
of us were still a little surprised to find ourselves gathered for such an
occasion. Their engagement, if you like, was a fox-trot... their wedding celebration,
by contrast, a slow and luxuriating rumba.
We arrived at the hotel between 10 and 11am, and by 11.30
corks began to pop. The ceremony started
at 12 (ish) followed by a splendidly languid period of champagne and
conversation, music and photographs, both inside a comfortable room and outside
on the luscious green lawn of a converted stately manor. There was no rush or bustle, tension or
over-fussing, we all sank into the joy of the day, renewing friendships and
quickly making new ones. At 14.30 we
meandered down a corridor to greet the bride and groom at the doorway to their
beautifully decorated reception room. People
introduced themselves, friends of friends mingled, families smiled. There wasn’t a hint of anything other than
sanguine waltz and leisure.
Then my inner tempo changed. I met someone. I met someone to whom I was inexplicably but
immediately drawn. And it was mutual. Our inner sound track, whatever it had been
before, switched to swing... hell, a quick-step... and that was before we got
near the dance floor.
Of course we were cooler than that in our outward
appearance, in our polite conversation, but within minutes we were (secretly) delighted
to find ourselves seated on adjacent tables.
Some days you just get lucky!
But back to the wedding: the ‘breakfast’ and speeches
were chirpy yet serene, packed with good stories, great food and wine, and
without any sense ‘time was getting away’.
Only at 5.30pm did we take an interval of sorts, to return to our rooms
to rest a little and get changed for the evening festivities. At 6.30pm it all started again – tables and
chairs had been pushed aside, a large dance floor uncovered, and a row of DJs
sat in a line preparing to work their magic.
This room of guests were all lovers of jive – because the groom has run
his own dance company for many years – and so it is gross understatement to say
the “bridal waltz” was spectacular... for it was a jive/tango like no “first
dance” I’ve ever seen (well, outside Strictly!). We oohed
and aahed, and caught their wonderful
energy like a thrown gauntlet. The dance
floor filled. The style continued, the
DJs worked magic, and underpinning our mood was a sultry, passionate
beat, a collective delight that our friends had found one-another and taken ‘the
big step’, and a hunger to not let the night escape before we had sampled all
the good things life has to offer.
Weddings will do that to you.
Of course our celebration of life was massively helped by
the fact that the wonderful hotel didn’t close the bar. They stopped the music
at an agreed time, but they left us to party as long and as wildly as we
liked. It was brilliant
hospitality. And only when 80% had gone
to bed did the final 20% make their way up to various hotel rooms to laugh and
carry-on and no doubt annoy their neighbours.
There was one major party room you could write a play about. But there were others too, many rooms, many
couples, where the tangos and delicious rumbas went on through the wee hours of
the morning... where giggles and delight clung to our tired bodies until the
sun tipped over the horizon and we could twinkle our toes not a second
longer. The band, in the end, has to
stop.
When we met again the following morning, there was a full
set of sunglasses and far less conversation.
We nodded and grinned at each other, but were hardly able to speak until
we’d topped up our reserves with a good English Breakfast. Then we moved (rather gingerly it must be
said) to another town, another country pub, and did our best to keep the
celebration going.
I wouldn’t have missed that weekend for the world. It was a most memorable wedding - for which
we can thank the bride and groom for their immaculate choreography, their
superior sense of tone and tempo, style and comfort, and their uncanny ability
to conduct festivities for their friends even as they retired to the Honeymoon
Suite.
Sweet indeed. And
much to muse upon.
