The Space Between the Notes
“The spaces between the notes,” said my father, “are as important as the notes themselves.”
I have no idea where we were driving, but I distinctly remember that we were in the car: an Oldsmobile Cutlass Cruiser station wagon with vinyl seats that got unbearably hot in the summertime. We were listening to a cassette tape of one of my father’s favorite bands. It was the sort of music that would later be known as “classic rock,” although that term hadn’t yet been coined.
I was young and, although I took piano lessons, I was an unremarkable student. I had a decent innate “ear” for melody, but little ambition for the sort of diligent practice that makes truly great musicians excel.
Why would the spaces between the notes be as important as the notes themselves? It seemed to me that it’s the notes we listen to: not the space between them. My father’s message made little sense to me at the time; but his words have remained in my memory. Perhaps he repeated that message a number of times, in the remaining years before his untimely death. My father had his flaws, which we needn’t get into here; but even the most flawed people can teach us something, if we are but prepared to listen.
Rhythm Matters
Have you ever heard a gifted young singer belt out a familiar tune without accompaniment? Have you noticed the way they prolong some of the notes but then skip important pauses, so that although the song is recognizable, it sounds all mangled because it fails to match the version you have stored in your own memory? Or, have you ever heard a total beginner (perhaps even yourself) attempt to plunk out a tune on the guitar? Have you noticed how they spend so much time searching for the next note that, although the notes themselves are more or less correct, the song becomes nearly unrecognizable, a mocking caricature of itself? That’s how most of us sound when we first attempt to play music: we are so focused on the notes that we are unable to consider the rhythm.
Any skilled dancer is keenly aware of the importance of rhythm and tempo. In order to move her body in time with the notes, the dancer must feel the rhythm of the music: not merely hear it with her ears, but feel its motion moving her very spirit, as she gracefully pliéts and pirouettes in time with the notes and the precisely measured spaces between them. The dance is a graceful motion through space and time. If the dancer does not respect the spaces in the music, then the rhythm of the dance breaks down.
As with music, so with life. We are often so concerned with details that we break the larger rhythmic movement of our lives: we fall out of step, and lose the groove of our intention. To get back into the rhythm of life, we must refocus outside ourselves, and take in the bigger picture: perhaps by visiting a tropical beach, or a forest; or by going to a concert.
Learning to Groove
One evening in my Sophomore year of college, I was playing guitar as some of my friends looked on. My buddy Dave, who was highly regarded in our circle as an accomplished musician, remarked that although I had a good ear for notes, “when you get better, you’ll work on your timing.” That remark stung enough that I still remember it, more than twenty years later. He was right, of course; although it probably wasn’t necessary for him to actually voice the thought out loud. The spaces between the notes are as important as the notes themselves; and the notes must occur at the proper time, in order for the music to groove.
About six months later, I got a 4-track tape recorder: very nearly the same device that my favorite rock band, Ween, had used to create their album, The Pod (an album highly prized among Ween aficionados, and considered nearly unlistenable by the rest of the world). I figured out the importance of timing on my own, over the next several years, as I played around with my 4-track. Recording original songs, layering the different instruments and voices on separate tracks one at a time, requires careful timing at every step, or else the resulting music just sounds like a mess of random notes. I eventually found that my recordings sounded best when I recorded a drum track first. Whether I played it on the congas or sequenced it on a drum machine, the rhythm track provided the structure which compelled all the other track to respect the spaces between the beats.
A year or two after college, I responded to a “Musician Wanted” ad in the Willamette Week, and met up with a guitarist at his house one night. He wanted to start a band, and I was willing to consider playing bass for him. We jammed for a while, and he played me some recordings he had made on his own 4-track tape recorder (it was still standard tech in those days). It quickly became apparent to me that although the guitarist had a decent ear, he had not yet mastered the all-important skill of timing. The recordings he played for me sounded like the recordings I had made several years earlier: they were a mess of random notes.
As with music, so with life. Whether one is a dancer, or a musician, or simply a student of life: finding the rhythm and learning to appreciate the spaces between events is the key to making it flow.
As internationally renowned bassist Victor Wooten says in his book The Music Lesson, “Before you can fully understand the notes, you must first understand the space you will place them in. Space can be seen as the birthplace of all things.”
And yet, time is relative
Albert Einstein tells us that time is relative. When one is traveling very fast; or when one approaches an object of very large mass: one’s personal time elapses at a different rate than the personal time of an external observer. How crazy is that? And yet, up until the moment when we cross the event horizon of a black hole, we can continue to make our own music in a steady rhythm — and dance to it — as long as we respect the space between the notes.
The Rhythm of Matter
Modern theoretical physics considers the distinction between “particles” and “energy” to be a difference in state, rather than form.
A certain vibration of energy appears to us as a subatomic particle, like a single note. Several of these particles vibrate together to form an atomic core, like a musical chord. Orbiting the atomic nucleus we find the outer rings of electrons, with the difference valences vibrating at their different frequencies. Relative to the size of the nucleus, the electrons orbit at a tremendous distance (unless you happen to be standing on a collapsed star). Most of an atom’s volume is but a void of empty space. Just as in a passage of music, the space between the vibrations holds the key to the shape of matter itself.
This pattern is repeated on a grand scale. Our sun, Sol, is the center of our planetary system, just as the atomic nucleus is the center of an atom. The Sun is the root note in the great chord of our lives, and it shines its light and heat on all the planets in orbit around it. The planets orbit the Sun just as electrons orbit the nucleus of an atom. The spaces between the planets are vast: so unimaginably vast that light itself takes several minutes to reach the Earth from our sun. The planets dance about the sun in a symphonic chorus, taking delight in the spaces between the notes: space which gives each of them the freedom to revolve in its own unique orbit… although, when the solar system was newly forming, objects must have often collided into one another, like the jumbled notes of an amateur multitrack recording.
On a still grander scale, Sol is but one of the hundred billion stars in the spiral Milky Way galaxy, each one of which may have planets of its own. Just as electrons dance about the nucleus, just as the planets dance about the sun, so the stars in our galaxy swirl around our galactic core: a massive quasar at the center of the galaxy. Although little is known of our nearest quasar as of yet, logic dictates that surely it anchors our galaxy together. Its force, as Yoda once said, binds us and penetrates us.
The quasar at the core of the Milky Way is like the central theme of a symphony: it opens the performance, and its influence is felt throughout the piece. The space between the notes shapes the piece of music, and the melodic theme defines how the music makes us feel. The space between the stars shapes the galaxy itself, and their whirling motion creates life, death, and endless possibilities, even as exploding stars spray the stardust of which we are formed.
No matter what we do or where we go, we are part of this great cosmic symphony. We are taking part in the dance of stars and planets; the pull of unseen forces beyond our imagination: the strains of stellar harmony, singing together to make the music of the spheres.
