My Favorite Things

I’ve had a line from a song stuck in my head for about a week now: “If you like piña coladas….” That’s the only line I know, and since I don’t at all enjoy cloying cocktails, I have no idea why I keep singing this line. The song is a trite one about someone finding his soul mate in the classifieds by listing various they like to do, which made me start thinking about the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II song, My Favorite Things. I don’t really know the words to that one either. In fact, the songs I know the lyrics to are limited to a few nursery rhymes and 80’s cartoon theme songs.

Relying solely on memory, my guess was that Rodgers was employing in this song an old trick of the trade that in medieval times was used as proof that the devil is always lurking in the shadows. In any major key, if you play the same notes beginning on the sixth note in that scale, you will be playing a minor key. Musicians call this the relative minor. I imagined the song skipped along in a major tonality until the B section ("When the dog bites…"), where he deftly switched to the relative minor.

The first thing I noticed upon hearing the actual tune was that the Julie Andrews version is atrocious. Singing is eschewed in favor of acting cutesy. Thankfully, the original Mary Martin version is listenable. And, as it turns out, I was totally incorrect in my imagined assessment. The song is played in E minor, which, in part because it only has one accidental (F#), is, for lack of a better description, gentle on the ears. (I remember as a kid asking a music teacher what minor keys were and being told it was a scale of notes that sounded spooky. This is an egregiously inadequate explanation.)

The song begins only with a B and the whole first phrase uses only two other notes, E and F#. It then gradually harmonically expands these notes in a manner reminiscent of Beethoven (for example), unraveling the notes cautiously and politely in a lilting, un-syncopated waltz. Then, the contrast in the B section is done simply by imposing a slur leading into a rest on the downbeat of every other measure. Simple. He is, after all, writing a children’s song.

Less than a year after the song debuted on Broadway in The Sound of Music and long before the movie adaptation, John Coltrane used My Favorite Things as a vehicle tune to reintroduce the soprano saxophone, an instrument that had been played by Sidney Bechet, a major figure in the development of jazz at the turn of the century, but had been virtually completely neglected since. Coltrane plays the melody in an elastic 6/8 time- common in African music but almost never heard in classical Western music- over a steadily repeating piano vamp (courtesy of McCoy Tyner) channeling an Afro-Cuban tumbao part. Adding syncopation immediately renders Rodger’s B section gimmick useless, and, in fact, Coltrane never plays the B section at all. Instead, Coltrane tacks a two measure turnaround onto the A section. A “turnaround” is a device frequently employed in jazz as a means to fluidly get from the end of a melody line back to the beginning. Once in place, the turnaround enables Coltrane to loop the A section ad nauseum. Indeed, Coltrane explores the A section in depth, but when he finally breaks free from it, he performs a parallel or, more generally, a modal transformation of the song, turning it from E minor to E major!

Whereas switching from a minor key to the relative major (for example, from E minor to G major) uses the same notes starting in two different places along the scale, a parallel change from E minor to E major involve different scale notes but start in the same place. The final movements of several late Romantic era Russian compositions, such as Rachmaninoff’s Symphony #2, also explore this move from E minor to E major. Coltrane, like every innovator, had been diligently doing his homework in researching the innovators that came before.

This may all be a bit tedious to you, and if so, you will be relieved that I removed an entire section elaborating on tonal modality, but are really going to want to kick my ass when I reveal my point in mentioning all this: the manipulation of frequencies, dynamics and tempos in sounds are among my favorite things. Another of my favorite things is researching innovators.

I am often criticized for being too picky. Call me what you will, but sometimes I feel like the complaint is really that I’m too curious. We humans are wired to enjoy all things magical. Where magic doesn’t exist, we maintain it with willful ignorance. Humans become conservative in order to avoid having to come to terms with the possibility that their knowledge, experiences or beliefs are sub-par. Anthropologically, the best explanation I can guess for this condition is that a sober assessment of reality would cause suicide rates to skyrocket and procreation rates to plummet. (Perhaps that’s just a pithy circular argument, i.e. we enjoy the magical because reality sucks.) Sometimes, finding out too much about something does destroy the allure. (One example that comes to mind is meeting George Clinton.) Other times, however, as is the case with John Coltrane’s musical endeavors, further discovery can increase the appeal to the point of obsession. For me, these are the truly wonderful things in life, which is why everybody’s constant yammering about how much they like something that they know little to nothing about will continue to peeve me to no end. But, to honor the example of Coltrane’s interpretation of My Favorite Things, I am going to attempt to avoid negativity and focus on things that make me happy.

Here are a few more of my favorite things: watching baseball (biased toward San Francisco Giants), watching soccer (biased toward FC Barcelona), playing disc golf, eating Thai food, eating seafood, drinking single malt Scotch whisky, making cocktails, laughing with friends, being able to say offensive things without anyone taking offense, watching Japanese movies, tinkering with non-digital gadgets, studying military history, debunking myths, giving massages, wielding knives, getting tattooed, female orgasms, listening to cicadas and thunderstorms, campfires, playing Risk, keeping abreast of advances in physics, science fiction in general, gaining independence in skill and thought, perusing thrift stores and estate sales, Glencairn whisky glasses, being in the presence of the ocean, exercising conscious awareness of sensory information, analyzing everything and hot showers.