#jackironsides

So the biggest and most important rhythmic secret anyone can ever learn has a name that sounds hilariously like either an unfortunate blood disease or an unfortunate Ancient Greek poet. But it is Life and Greatness; it is the secret that makes compound time magic, and I am such a huge sucker for it that back when facebook was an exciting new platform that had just been opened to a few schools outside the ivy league, including mine, back when fb groups were a form of self-expression and not a freebooting nightmare, I made a facebook group called "If Hemiola Were A Person, We'd Be Married." Yes. And 17 of my closest music school friends joined, because hemiola is really that great.

Here is what it means: you are in compound time (a kind of meter that has beats made of 3 smaller beats). You arrange those tiny beats into groups of 2 instead.* Like this:

| | |   | | | -> | |   | |   | |

Think of the coolest thing about the rhythm in the classic Theory 101 hemiola demonstration standby, America from West Side Story. It goes onetwothree onetwothree onetwo onetwo onetwo. That's one way to hemiola. The most obvious way, very good, very satisfying.

A more advanced (and more connotatively piratical, but we'll get to that in a bit) way to hemiola is to do the 3 and the 2 at the SAME TIME. This can be in different instruments, or in the same instrument at different points in the melody of the same bar; the options are endless. You end up with a rhythm that, devil take it, can only reasonably be called Rollicking. Is it in 3? Is it in 2? DOESN'T MATTER. IT'S HEMIOLA. IT'S IN BOTH. Listen to the A section of He's a Pirate; it has everything that can possibly be in both 3 and 2 going on at once. The melody, played by some forthright horns and low strings, has a rhythm that mostly divides the bar into 3, while still keeping the pickup subdivision that makes you feel like the little beats are in 2 big groups of 3. I'll write the rhythm out with periods for rests and pipes for played beats and divide them into the groups I hear them in, with big spaces between the bars: (...) .||    |. |. ||    |. |. ||    |. |. ||    ||. .||    |. |. ||    |. |. ||    |. |. ||    |.. .||    |. |. ||    |. |. ||    |. |. ||    ||. .||    |. |. |.    ||. .||    |. |. ||   |.. ...

The most ambiguous thing here is the middle beat of the bar, the 4th one if you're counting it in 6 (2nd if you're in 2, 1.5 if you're in 3). This whole melody hinges on that empty beat. Is it part of the second note? Or is it a springboard for the last two notes? Is it an on-beat or an offbeat? IT'S HEMIOLA. IT'S BOTH. MAGIC. Obviously some bars will be easier to hear in 2 (the fourth bar at end of each phrase, for example, which starts with two notes in a row with no space between, and a really emphatic drum hit on beat 4 (or 2, or 1.5) while no notes are happening). Some are easier to hear in 3; the rest of the phrase, besides the fourth bar, has at least two notes per bar that sounds like they should be grouped in Big Three (two little beats per group). The best part about it, and what makes the Rollicking so successful (one might even say, as OP did, that it is Jaunty) is that for most of these bars, it is equally easy to hear them in 3 or in 2. The British Isles, particularly the bits that the English tried and failed to assimilate, are deeply associated with this kind of rhythmic ambiguity. In fact the wikipedia example of what an Irish drum (bodhrán) sounds like is mostly composed of 6/8 hemiola, and though it's not the best playing I've ever heard, it is a good example of the rhythms usually played on that drum.

I'm counting the climactic bit that sounds like cutlass swipes (there's our Swashbuckling) about 0:33-0:46 as a B section. Why does it buckle the swash? Because all the beats of the melody have been occupied so far in this tune, and now there are big holes. Are they still hemiola? Yes. It's just the slightly more obvious kind that switches back and forth between 2 and 3 beats per bar in one voice instead of both at once through ambiguous beat 4 (or 2 or 1.5):

|.. .||   |.. ...   |.. ...    ||. |..    |.. .||    |. |. |.   |.. .||   |. |. |.   ||. ...   |. |. |.   ||. ...   |. |. |.   |.. .(||) (the last two pipes here are the pickup to the C section and can be counted as rests for the purposes of the B section)

But don't worry, both kinds of subdivision are still happening everywhere else. It's a mechanically complex but simply majestic pearl of a tune.

Which brings us to Secret #2: augmentation. This is why we feel the buckle is swashed atop the bowsprit, rather than anywhere else on board. This one is Particularly Secret, because to be honest there is no literal augmentation going on in this song, just the implication of it.** This might be a bit harder to explain.

The C section of this song, starting at 0:45 right after the cutlass swipes, goes rhythmically like this (basically two times in a row, with different notes the second time):

(||)   |.. .||    |. |. |.    |. |. |.    |.. .||    |.. .||    |. |. |.   |. .. |.    |.. (...)

Look how many groups of unambiguous 3 there are in this horn melody! With big holes in the rest of the bars! This makes the melody sound slower, because not as many small notes in a row are being played, even though there are still the same underlying rhythms happening in the drums and the accompanying figures that are not the melody. It's like we're on the top of the ship instead of underneath in the waves being bashed on the hull by all the little chops and splashes we hear in the drums and cellos. We can see/hear those little subdivisions, we're just not involved in them right now: this is how we become majestic. The drums are definitively in 2, which emphasizes the moments when the melody is more 3ish. The bass line and accompanimental figures are ambiguous.

This brings us to Secret #3: orchestration.

The magnificence and high wind (which causes rough seas) are indeed related to some cellos. The swash wouldn't be nearly so all-encompassing if the orchestrators hadn't picked the instruments they picked (I'm not sure who orchestrated this particular moment of the soundtrack; see the wikipedia entry on the 7 different composers hired to orchestrate this score because of weird production reasons). There is an ASTONISHINGLY small number of kinds of instruments used in this song considering the forces available in an orchestra, and all but the cellos, horns, basses, and drums are basically decorations on top of the main tune.

Here is the obvious thing: it's very low. Cellos are pretty low instruments, basses are Really low instruments, horns have the capability to go high but do not do it in this song, and drums have no exact pitch but most of the ones used in this piece for the main beats are low in frequency with occasional high crashy sounds for emphasis. Cellos, and I don't think I'm making this up, I've read association studies, sound like wood. Horns are used in hollywood scores (and for hundreds of years before movies were invented) for noble and majestic melodies, associated with noble and majestic characters and environments and qualities (check out some Wagner for more information about the association of melodies with story elements before movies were invented). This is the deet where we start thinking about notes instead of just rhythms.

It is pretty unusual for notes so low to be so fast. A gem of an aphorism I picked up in high-school-orchestra rehearsals (from the director, no less): "an octave lower, an octave slower." (This was usually meant as a gentle tease to the bass section for not playing their part right, or on time, but it works as an explanation of normal orchestration principles.) We don't expect our driving, foundational bass frequencies to move from note to note so fast. Usually if they do, it's an exceptional showoff moment in a bigger orchestral context where the violins or other high instruments are doing the rest of the fast stuff. Here, the violins are just doubling the low strings to emphasize them when the melody is repeated; the high strings aren't even playing all the time. What this means is that the low instruments are showing off all the time, so it's very drivy and feels much faster than it would if just the high instruments were doing the tune.

It's also one of the reasons the song is foreboding; very low notes, punctuated with high shrieky interjections (like the violin swashes in the cutlass section), is the technique used in horror scoring, which we have been conditioned to associate with something scary. Also I think there is some science there.

Another reason it is a bit foreboding (though other sections of the soundtrack are More Foreboding, for example Fog Bound but we're just talking about the main theme in this post) is Secret #4: modal borrowing.

Let's be clear here, there's nothing Super Weird going on in this melody modally, but there are several ways to do a minor scale, and it takes advantage of more than one. Minor keys have a surprising amount of options regarding what notes to use after the fifth scale degree; you can have a low 6 and 7 (often used coming down the scale), or a high 6 and 7 (usually for going up), or low 6 and high 7 (this is often used to sound middle-eastern) or a high 6 and low 7 (this is not often used, since low 6 is good for tension in that half-step going to the 5th degree, but if it is used, it sounds folky and maybe Old). This array of usual options means you don't really have to borrow much to have both kinds of 6th and 7th scale degrees, but the fact that the melody so frequently emphasizes the low 7 (whole step between 7 and 1, instead of half) makes it sound modal and British-folk-ish. Listen to some jigs (Butterfly, for example) or reels (like this whole set of them) or really any minor-key Irish or Scottish folk music and you'll find it has low 7.

This frequent low 7th scale degree means the chord that starts on the 5th scale degree, usually called the V chord in classical parlance, is in fact in this situation the v chord, because it's minor. That's modal borrowing! The minor v chord is not really native to any mode, because usually we make the V chord major even if 7 is low in the scale, but we call it borrowing anyway. It is a particular kind of sound where the drive of the five chord to the one chord is less strong, because the low 7 doesn't want quite as badly to lead to 1. This makes the chord more atmospheric than functional, and it might be more foreboding this way. It's not rare, it's not exceptional, but it is definitely associated with the British Isles (more the 19th century than the 17th, but fewer people know actual 17th century tunes) and folk music and sea chanties etc. This may be how we know it's the jolly roger flapping from the mast.

However! The tune also has moments of high 7! And this means V is major sometimes! Like the end of the A section before it repeats slightly differently (0:17). The fact that both of these chords exist in this tune makes it even borrowier, because usually you get only one of these kinds of five chord. But sometimes we have major V, which makes it More Climactic, the spectacular flaps of the jolly roger.

The last Secret I would like to relate is #5: cadential rhythm. This is the reason we have any actual association with the 17th century instead of the 19th (most piratey music anyone knows is from the 19th century).

Cadences (a cadence is the way a phrase ends) have been classified over the centuries, in terms of both rhythm and melody, into two kinds. They are conventionally called masculine and feminine, or strong and weak, but those are bullshit names so I am calling them direct and indirect. A direct cadence lands on the downbeat, and probably on the root of the chord. An indirect cadence lands after the downbeat, and so the first note of the bar isn't the cadential note; the note after it is.

The way He's A Pirate uses indirect cadential rhythm is especially emphatic. The very first phrase (0:05-0:08) cadences on the second tiny beat of the bar instead of the first. Since the tiny beats go real fast, it's very obvious how the phrase lands on Not The Big Beat. The tinier the beats are, the more emphatic the syncopation is. BUT THEN: the second phrase cadences directly (0:08-0:11). It goes back and forth between direct and indirect until the end of the A section when we have two indirects in a row, which makes the direct (on major V, no less!) last one especially swashbuckly.

Here is a playlist of 17th century English songs (mostly in compound time), the first of which is also full of hemiola, many (especially the third, 14th, 15th and 16th) of which have indirect cadences at the end of nearly every phrase. The switching back and forth between the two kinds of cadential rhythm is really important to the piratical nature of this song, contributes to the jauntiness, and has actual connections to historical 17th century tunes (though this cadential strategy is also common in the 19th century sea folk tunes people are more likely to know). BEHOLD THE GALLEON.

I hope that these Secrets have been Revealed. If my explanatory techniques have been too obscure, please do ask me about things you find unclear; I larve this song to tiny tiny bits and would be delighted to explain it forever.