Downbeat
In my world, there is an official way that music begins. Whether there’s a conductor on the podium or no one in front of a rock band, there is a signal – a breath, a gesture, a collective togetherness that everyone knows is the starting point. Let’s say it’s an orchestra. The conductor raises her arms - yes, it’s my world and I want there to be many more women conductors because it’s been centuries and why do most of the conductors (and all of the presidents) have to be men? I’m tired of it. Anyway. She raises her arms, gives the group “the look,” perhaps gives a preparatory beat or two to indicate tempo, and then wham! Her baton comes down and the orchestra leaps into sound. The downbeat. The thing that gets everything going.
For months and months in 5th grade band, I had NO idea what Mr S was doing with his arms and his stubby little baton that might have just been a pencil. I gleaned a little by side-eying my classmates. Arms up meant instruments up to our chops. Then something something something else and suddenly everyone starts playing. Well, they were playing and I was trying to find my way. I always missed the first few notes. Always missed the downbeat because I didn’t understand what it was.
I once had a professor who claimed that music is a parallel to our everyday temporal lives. There’s the major downbeat (we’re born), then days, a year, more years, a decade, several more decades with all the crescendos and cadences and thrilling harmonic passages. But, he insisted, years flow into each other. The new year is just a mini-downbeat - one second we’re in the old year and the next we’re in the new one. It’s the start of a new movement. Time flows, the temporal nature of our lives mirrors music. Themes and melodies start and stop, there’s tension and resolution, beginnings and endings and the spaces between the notes, the silences, make it more interesting.
Yesterday was the mini-downbeat of the new year, if you buy his analogy. I’m still thinking about it.
