The distracting beat of the drummer

Have you ever tried to dance a waltz while polka music was playing?

Have you ever tried to sing a madrigal while bongo drums were playing?

Okay, my examples might be a little far afield.  I thought of the first one earlier today as a sort of metaphor. The second one, though I have actually done. As a member of Madrigalia Bar Nonne I have sung on Merlin’s Berm at the Kansas City Renaissance Festival while bongos played at the drum shop just across the way. Or while the gypsies did a dance around the maypole.

The latter actually wasn’t as bad, from a timing perspective, as the drum was. Now when they were playing the pipes also sold at the drum shop, in a different key from which we were singing, up or down a half step, or a whole step, that was a real trial.

Yet that is what a lot of people are doing today. I am thinking specifically of my first question, waltzing to polka music (though people today might be dancing the polka to waltz music).

I came up with the idea while waiting to start my workout with Jesse Samborski, my personal trainer.  When I first started working out at his personal studio, he asked if I had a preferred sort of music to work out to. I opted for no music.  It only took a couple of times of his asking to remember my preference. I find outside music distracting when doing repetitive motions. If there is recorded music, whatever tempo, whatever beat, it has is what I will end up doing. I’d rather set my own tempo by singing to myself and counting the beat to myself. Yet most people listen to music while they work out, and if you look at them, there is no correlation between their motions and the music.

I remember watching The Sound of Music performed at Kansas City’s Starlight Theatre this summer.  There were numbers where the nuns processed, and there was the wedding scene where Maria and the rest of the cast processed. The music had a certain cadence, with the intent that you march, you process to that cadence. Same thing with a marching tune for a band or an army. The tune is for everyone to stay in step with it.  But at Starlight, in Sound of Music, they were not in step with it.

And the same is true of the people I see working out. Not that it is critical to be in step when working out. But it shows how people are disconnected to the music of the world around them, both formal and informal. It is all white noise. Might as well be chaos.