Dancer

single
(not yet released on any album)

click to enlarge

• STORY / LYRICS
• MUSIC
  
  • "GLUING" TOGETHER THE SONG PARTS
  • PIANO SONG
  • BEETHOVEN
  • MUSIC! MUSIC! MUSIC!
• COVER ART

STORY / LYRICS

I wrote Dancer in 1979 (when I was 21). I had begun graduate school at Stanford University in California. It was, for me, a time of open-ended exploration and personal growth. It was California, so I experimented with encounter groups. And I took classes I never would have considered taking when I was an undergraduate student, focused on my major.

One of those was a class in modern dance. When I showed up for the first class (in a large dance studio), I knew this was going to be a unique experience for me, just looking around! I was the only male student, and, as it turned out, all my other classmates had taken many years of dance classes, and had years of ballet experience. I had no formal dance training whatsoever. So I immediately spoke to my teacher before the class started, and asked her if maybe I didn't belong here. She was a wonderful, wise, and welcoming woman who had seen everything before. She smiled and said, "You'll be fine — I'll make sure of that."

The Presidio in San Francisco
(click image to enlarge)

And she did! I remember one field trip we took to the Presidio in San Francisco — a beautiful setting for a dance class. Our teacher set us before the steps of one of the buildings, and directed us to take the concept of time and translate it into dance movement. I recall trying different rhythms up and down the steps— sometimes slow, sometimes fast, sometimes a couple of steps at a time. My teacher called out, "Very good, Chris!" That drew a dark look in my direction from a classmate, who said in a rather snooty tone, "But what he's doing is so obvious!" Our teacher then launched into a beautiful defense of the obvious, the gist of which was that modern dance doesn't have to be abstract and inaccessible. I was so grateful to her!

I wrote Dancer a little after taking that modern dance class. The lyrics were very much inspired by the metaphor of life as dancing, which I learned during that class. The primary line of the chorus, "Dance with me", then, takes on the much larger meaning of joining two lives together.

* * *

Another theme in a lot of my songs from this time was personal growth. That has always been a core value in my life, and that value is reflected in many of my songs. You can hear it in Dancer: the reference to self-knowledge; and the line, "all the time, she's growing even though it's sometimes hard to break through."

MUSIC

"Gluing" together the song parts — Dancer has two distinct musical parts: the verses and the chorus. The chorus is significantly faster than the verses. When I first began arranging this song (in 2022), I realized that just following the verse with the chorus wouldn't work: the sudden increase in energy and tempo was too jarring. So I came up with a musical "device" — an upward slide with the bass (accompanied by the faster drum track):

This created a bridge between the slower and faster parts, and that — by being a rising tone — served to signal to the listener the increase in energy and speed:

Gluing together the end of the fast chorus with the beginning of a slower verse was handled much more easily: the chorus just comes to a sudden stop. The resulting pause between the two musical sections allows for a simple reset of energy and speed without any jarring experience:

Piano song — Musically, Dancer is fundamentally a piano song: the style of the piano accompaniment drives the moods of the song.

So for example, the mood of the verses is set by the jazzy, bouncy, bluesy style of its piano accompaniment:

Just so, the mood of the first half of the chorus is established by the disco-like style of its piano accompaniment and drum track:

The third mood of the song is set by the Beethoven-like piano style in the latter part of the chorus (followed by a bridge passage that closes out the chorus):

I'll say more about this in the next section, because the Beethoven section of the song was the most challenging part to arrange.

Beethoven — When I was young, I was trained in playing classical piano. Beethoven has always been one of my favorite composers. While I like all of his music, as a pianist, I particularly love his piano sonatas. As I was writing Dancer, when I got to the second half of the chorus, I suddenly had the insight that it would be perfect to have that part of the chorus be in the style of a Beethoven piano sonata.

Now, I was aware that other pop/rock artists had used Beethoven's music as their jumping off point. Perhaps most famously, John Lennon was listening to the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata (Sonata No. 14):

He decided he wanted to write a song inspired by the arpeggios. That jumping off point would result in the beautiful Beatles song, Because:

If you listen to these two back to back, you won't find a lot in common. I don't think too many people would listen to Because and say, "Oh, that sounds like Beethoven!" Yes, the two are in the same key, and they both use arpeggiated chords. But the sound in Because is completely different: it's a harpsichord, not a piano. The shape and rhythm of the arpeggios is completely different. And the whole focus in the opening of Because is the creation of an interesting sequence of chord changes, whereas the opening of The Moonlight Sonata is all about introducing the melody.

Of course, Lennon had no particular intention of sounding like Beethoven: the Moonlight Sonata was just a jumping off point for his own inspiration and creativity. But in the case of the Dancer chorus, I really wanted the section to sound like a Beethoven piano sonata, to the point where listeners familiar with Beethoven would say, "That sounds like Beethoven's piano sonata style!" (And for those listeners unfamiliar with Beethoven's music, I wanted them to simply enjoy the music in this section, and experience it as seamlessly integrated with the entire song, and so sounding completely natural not odd or out of place.)

So I set to work. I learned a lot of things about classical music and pop music in the process. For one thing: a piano sonata is a much longer musical form than a pop song. You can't just drop a piece of a Beethoven sonata in a pop song and expect it to "fit". Sonatas have a lot more time to develop ideas than pop songs. If I wanted to "import" a musical idea from a sonata into a pop song, I had to find a way to develop it much faster in the pop song. Just one example: one of Beethoven's most distinctive devices is his playing the same note over and over again for a period. Perhaps the most memorable example of this is the repeated note at the beginning of the Waldstein Sonata (Sonata No. 21):

Here is the piano part that accompanies the Beethoven section in Dancer:

The Waldstein Sonata repeats that initial note 14 times. That's way too many times for a pop song (especially when I'm setting words to the notes). So my "repeating note" repeats 7 times: enough to convey the same unique "Beethoven hammering", but in a way that actual works in the song. The next thing you can notice: the tempo is slower. I'm singing words to these notes, and the speed of the notes in the Waldstein is too fast for singing. So I've slowed down the tempo, but when you here it, it dosn't sound slow at all, relative to the song, as you can hear when I add in the singing:

Another issue in mapping over from a sonata to a pop song: My original piano scoring was more complex and dense, like an actual Beethoven sonata. But when I added the vocal tracks, the whole thing sounded "mushy": you couldn't hear the distinct piano notes. So I stripped down the piano part to the essentials I was trying to capture, without the density. For the same reason, I removed all other instruments — drum, etc. — other than piano and voice, so those could be heard as clearly as possible. (A drum track is not necessary because the piano very much serves as the percussion instrument and timekeeper in this section.) The end result, when combined with with the vocals, sounds to me like it does exactly what I wanted: to convey the feeling of a Beethoven sonata in a pop song, in a way that sounds completely natural and integrates seamlessly with what comes before and after. Listening to a dramatic section of a Beethoven sonata is thrilling; and that's what I wanted the listener to experience here, regardless of whether it makes them think of Beethoven.

Beethoven's sonatas have many beautiful qualities. But my Beethoven section is only 10 bars long. So I chose just two qualities to focus on in my 10 bars:

1. Beethoven's dramatic hammering, which some consider his music's most distinctive quality. (See the cartoon below for a humorous communication of this point.)
2. His freewheeling modulation through key changes.

click image to enlarge

As for the freewheeling use of key changes. . . I use the same musical devices Beethoven used to modulate through three key changes in my 10 bar section:

• F minor. The section starts in F minor. This then modulates to the relative key of. . .
• A flat (via the pivot chord, E flat). This then modulates to the closely related key of. . .
• D flat (via the pivot chord, A flat diminished 7th).

Music! Music! Music! — When I wrote the piano accompaniment for the verses in Dancer, I knew I was drawing upon a very old musical tradition, but I had no specific songs in mind. The bouncy syncopation certainly harks back to the era of ragtime piano and Scott Joplin (1899-1927), whose piano music I loved playing as a kid. Probably "honky tonk piano songs" was the particular musical well I was drawing from:

But I also wondered if there were any songs a little closer to the time when I wrote Dancer (in 1979), that might have had a similar feeling, and that I might have been drawing upon.

It took a lot of digging, but I found a great one, from 1950: the very popular song, Music! Music! Music! (by Stephen Weiss and Bernie Baum) and performed by Teresa Brewer:

If you listen to just the first few seconds of Music! Music! Music! (above) and the first few seconds of the piano accompaniment for the verses in dancer (below) you'll hear the similarity:

Of course after those few seconds, the songs diverge greatly. But I wouldn't be surprised if Music! Music! Music! was in my subconscious as I wrote the piano accompaniment, since it was a song I've always loved.

Interestingly, even when the song was written in 1950, it was considered a "novelty song": everyone listening to it knew it was hailing back to the earlier ragtime period, as this sketch on the Ed Sullivan show (with Teresa Brewer) shows — the ragtime pianist, the 1890's style clothing, the saloon setting, etc.:

One unexpected surprise as I listened to Music! Music! Music!: the melody of the chorus is directly lifted from Franz Liszt's well-known Hungarian Rhapsody #2:

Such a curious coincidence — I drew (part of) my chorus from Beethoven, and they drew their chorus from Liszt. . .

COVER ART

The cover art is based on the final lines of the song:

And in his mind, an image forms
of forests and deep windy seas.
And he is there and she with him,
two dancers beneath summer trees.

click image to enlarge