Levitating 21 Times
For those of you that are unaware, Tigran Hamasayan is a renowned Jazz pianist and composer, who also happens to be one of my biggest inspirations as a musician. His intuitive ability to create spectacular pieces of music alongside simple modalities and mind-bending time signatures are absolutely breathtaking at the very least. Even on his most overt jazz compositions and renditions of well-known jazz pieces, his improvisations often contain embellishments based on scales from Middle Eastern/Southwest Asian traditions.
Tigran Hamasayan’s track, Levitation 21, is one such piece that reflects the concept of reorganizing existing sub-beats in different groups to create different musical expressions that all sum up to the exact same totals.
The Analogy of Denominations
Say I have a bunch of Rupees. If I were to throw them across a table and ask you to tell me precisely how much money was on the table, you’d have no clue right? Well of course, you’d have to count them all before knowing the exact value, but there are too many coins to simply rely on accurate guesswork.
Too many to count? Well, how about now?
Easier right? Sure, you do need to be familiar with the Indian Rupee, but the math stays the same. In that case, how about now?
In essence, what I’m doing here is that I’m representing the same amount of money in different ways, or different groups, and the exact same goes for our song. The total sum of the song is 21, which means that theoretically speaking, the time signature is 21/16.
21 is a big number when it comes to time signatures and much like those 100 rupees, if I were to just split a 21/16 click track and ask you what time signature we were in, you’d get lost. It’s just way too much and you’d struggle to intuitively relate to it.
So what now? Well, by taking this big bar of 21/16 and breaking it down into smaller chunks, you can establish some musical sense within that huge bar and make it tangible, much like how a 10 rupee note is easier to perceive than two 5 rupee coins, and ten 1 rupee coins respectively. Now let’s dive into the music.
Levitation 21 Breakdown
We can focus on each instrument within the piece, analyze each instrument’s sense of time, and work from there. Upon giving the song a listen, you’ll notice a few versions of the same 21/16 being played simultaneously by each instrument.
Let’s start with the Piano. Here’s a snippet of the melody.
You’ll notice that the piano is playing the exact same line as from the intro of the song, but the drums give it a whole new context. So for this specific section, the 21/16 pattern is divided into 7 groups of 3.
Let’s move on to the next pattern iteration that’s played by the high-pitched muted cymbal. Here’s what that sounds like:
Here, our beloved 21/16 bar is divided, quite symbolically, as the opposite of the piano via three groups of seven.
Here’s the same bar with a click to help you hear it:
Next, the bass pattern divides the 21/16 bar in yet another way. This one is three groups of five 5 and a six. The bass is very much pushed in the background of the track, so try to see if you can notice it.
Here’s what that sounds like:
Now we get into the tricky part, the kick and the snare. Although they sound pretty simple, they’re the most interesting aspect of the track.
Essentially, they play one hit every six sub beats, or groupings of 6, or a dotted quarter note. They’re all the same. Therefore, you split these into seven groups of six (or two groups of 21). That’s not all. They also alternate between themselves, creating a very slow backbeat groove. It’s quite hard to ignore when trying to find the time signature.
Even though the piano is the main instrument of the track, the drums still have most of the power and influence over how you perceive the time signature. That’s why the fundamental question of “what time signature are we in?” depends on who you ask.
So what do we take from all of this?
Here we have four different ways of expressing that 21/16 bar played simultaneously. Taking something that is seemingly impossible to render musical is precisely where Tigran and his fellow bandmates excel at surprising us with masterful renditions of interesting perceptions of time.
The lesson? Levitation 21 is a pretty damn cool piece.