Freestyle wedding music, or damn it, woman, count!

Last night I was at a wedding party. Actually, it was all day long cause a cousin of my wife’s got married, but what made me write this post was the actual party, not the paperwork or religious service.

So, a short overview of what Romanian wedding music means: usually there are 2 main traditional dance styles in Romania that are suited for weddings, a faster one and a middle paced one. Both have speed variations, but basically these are the 2 main, period, both being traditional folkloric dances. There are also other regional variations, but wherever you go in Romania, if you are going to take part to a wedding, you’d better know to dance these 2.

Now, what this has got to do with music? All the (traditional)songs can be adapted to fit these 2 dance styles so you get to a point where no matter what you are singing, it works on one of these 2 styles. Both are 4/4 so it’s not that difficult. If you have seen my previous post about Romanian folkloric music you will understand me better. They both dance in large circles, usually a lot of people participate to these circles.

Now to get to my point: there was this band on stage, playing, when I got there. I didn’t give them too much attention since I was already tired and frankly I was also hungry, after a long day of running around with the groom and bride and barely waiting for the food.

But at one moment, the band managed to get my attention since they managed to play some common songs on a totally different rhythm than the original one. The original song had a rhythm where the singer had enough room to breath. Musically speaking, a song needs breaks, pauses for the voice, a song can not have the lyrics chained one to the other, since nobody will understand anything from it. Well, this was the case with a few songs there. Imagine a fast paced dance, fast measures, where one sentence ends at the end of the measure and the next one starts right in the beginning of the next one, forced by the rhythm.

This was a mistake, since they forced these songs on a rhythm that was not the original one. Honestly I couldn’t understand why they did it since the original songs were quite good, very known and were very “danceable”, which is always a good thing at weddings.

Well, now comes the second part of my frustration: given these fast measures and lyrics that ended at the exact end of the measure, the singer actually didn’t have the time to start the next verse in the beginning of the next measure, on the first beat because she needed to breath, so…she let one more beat to go!! So, instead of starting on the first beat of the second measure, she started on the 2nd or on the 3rd, starting counting an other measure from there!!

For me it was frustrating, even if I didn’t pay too much attention to them, the songs have a fluency and a rhythm that leads you and you start feeling it at one point. When the measures are not well respected, you feel it effortlessly. I guess it has to do with your inner mathematical/musical sense.

After a while I realized this girl that was singing had quite a habit of not counting the beats in measures, even if she had all the time in the world to breath. So, it was quite frequent to start singing on the 2nd or 3rd beat instead of the first beat of the next measure and start counting from there and this happened no matter the rhythm of the song. For God’s sake, woman, count! Damn it!

I remember I had an experience with a girl singing in my band about 10 years ago, we had this song that had 8 measures in the beginning of it, measures that had a particular meaning, a melody that justified those exact 8 measures there! Well, she didn’t count too well, almost each time we played that song, on stage, she counted till 4 or 6 instead of 8 and started singing. The only good thing it was the fact that the chord was the same as the one where she should have started singing so we quickly played along exchanging glances! Damn, woman, count! Damn it!

Well, after a few bottles of wine with friends and family, these things were overcome, since overall, the singer didn’t sing flat or anything like this, she had a good voice, I think her math was not very good(considering counting beats in a 4/4 measure), or breathing sense, but they kept a good spirit for the audience and the songs were good.

I came back in the morning with a small headache, but not because of the music. This was from the Whiskey and wine, I guess. Too many glasses of wine?

But, well, again…who’s counting? Damn it, woman!

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