Felines, Nothing More Than Felines

A wee comment left at Chris Caggiano's blog. In a post about overrated musicals he asks his students to burrow down and figure out what's "wrong" with some well-known shows. It seems that Cats proves to be one of the trickier assignments:

"I've only ever had one student who came close to capturing what is really wrong with Cats. She focused on the fact that Andrew Lloyd Webber stuck too close to the original T.S. Eliot poems, which are mostly written in the third person. As a result, we rarely hear any of the cats singing about themselves, rather we hear about them from a third party. So, we never develop a bond with anyone on-stage, with the exception of Grizabella, who sings one of the few songs in the show that wasn't based directly on one of Eliot's poems. Pretty savvy, huh?"

This is not im-paws-able. But allow me to throw my penny into the kitty.

I'm not sure that this third person thing is the problem. Cats is a series of character portraits, not characters. As such we're not being asked to develop a bond with the characters so much as delight in the imagination that's portraying them. We're not bonding with the kitties; we're bonding with the whimsical mind of TS Eliot.

If Cats has a problem then it's more to do with the straight-jacketing effect of the light verse which sometimes forces the music into a predictable tum-ti-tum-ti-tum pattern. Sometimes Lord Andy can overcome this problem with inventive little bits of rhythm (as in the phrase: "The Rum Tum Tugger is a curious cat"). But the verse still doesn't quite offer the flexibility of an original lyric.

Even so, it's still a very entertaining miaow-sical.

Desert Island Discs in the South Pacific

Old interview with Lord Andy from Radio 4's archive of Desert Island Discs.

The Lord's (at that time merely Sir's) music selections are typically diverse - from rock 'n' roller Shostakovich to Bollywood composer AR Rahman - as well as typically populist - Elvis Presley and The Beatles. Only one pick was a musical theatre number but it was a goody: Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Some Enchanted Evening".

Hard to argue with that. But what makes the melody so enchanting? For me, the secret of the song is in one little semi-tone. Let's take the first six notes:

"Some En-chan-ted Eve-ning"

The second of those notes is an F sharp. If you are of a certain musical disposition and knowing that we are in the key of C, you may give a small shudder. F sharp, you see, is foreign to the key of C. It should be an F natural. Play a C chord and stick an F sharp on top of it and it sounds dissonant, wonky, wrong.

So how come this wrongness sounds so right? Well, firstly the F sharp falls on an off-beat - the "en" of "enchanted" - so there isn't a direct clash with the chord underneath. Place that F sharp on an on-beat like the "eve" of "eve-ning" and the whole thing sounds wonky again.

Secondly, try substituting the foreign-sounding F sharp for a "proper" F natural. Go on, I dare you. With just that tiny change the melody feels so different; it's lighter and brighter but, at the same time, a whole lot less enchanting.

The song is from South Pacific. The character singing is Emile de Becque, a romantic (he's French) and exotic (he has half-Polynesian kids) plantation owner with a dark past (he killed a man). In short, he is a man who would definitely sing an F sharp.

Sometimes a semi-tone makes all the difference.